


Richie Reloaded

by RanjantheVictor



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Artist Ben, Depressed Richie Tozier, Designer Eddie, Designer Richie, First Time, First Time Bottoming, First Time Topping, Fluff and Angst, Lonely Richie Tozier, M/M, Minor Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Misunderstandings, Oral Sex, Programmer Stan, Smut, Tester Bev, Video & Computer Games, Writer Bill Denbrough, writer mike
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:35:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 97,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24455278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RanjantheVictor/pseuds/RanjantheVictor
Summary: What if Richie Tozier grew up without the Losers? How would the Trashmouth turn out if he never got the chance to meet his friends?orRichie's life isn't going well until he starts work at a video games company.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 178
Kudos: 155





	1. Current market share

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be a pretty Richie-centric fic, and is about a Richie who never got the support of the Losers when he was a kid, and without that he ended up turning in on himself. It's going to be angsty and hopefully funny, with eventual fluff.
> 
> Also, everyone works at a video game developer, because video games are cool.

“Shit.”

Richie stood up, turned to his left and began to pace frantically.

“Shit. Shit.”

His long loping legs carried him to the end of his boxy little studio remarkably quickly, so he turned, paced in the opposite direction, hit the other wall and turned once more.

“Shit. Shit. And shit.”

Pace, swear, turn, repeat. Pace, swear, turn, repeat.

_“Richie. Relax”_ Dobbin piped up from his place on the sofa.

“How on earth do expect me to relax?” Richie yelped out in response. “Do you know-?”

_“Just breathe”_

“Of course I’m breathing! It’s easy see!” Richie huffs twice to demonstrate that yes, he can indeed respire. “What do you think I’m doing? Asphyxiating? Do I look blue right now?”

_“A little green maybe, but not blue.”_ Dobbin chuckled to himself at his little joke. _“Don’t worry Richie. It’s going to be –“_

“Don’t tell me it’s going to be all hunky dory tomorrow, because it’s not!” Richie squawked. 

_”No it’s probably not going to be hunky or dory, or weedy or Nemo for that matter, but is going to be okay. Just okay, but I promise you that. You have this.”_ Dobbin had a rich slow voice, plummy as jam and interspersed with the ‘mwap mwap’ sound of someone smacking their lips around their smoking pipe. Despite his awful jokes, Dobbin never failed to soothe Richie when he was agitated. So Richie took his advice, breathed deep and forced himself to stop pacing. His left leg quivered with the effort of keeping still. Richie turned back towards the sofa and squatted down so he was face to face with his friend.

He swallowed heavily. “You’re sure about this right? Please tell me you mean that” Richie said, his eyes wide and pleading.

Dobbin stared straight back. “Meow” he said, in real life.

Because the real problem with Dobbin is not his jokes, or his five-pipe-a-day smoking habit, but rather the fact that Dobbin is a pudgy cat and hasn’t ever dispensed any advice in any voice whatsoever, plummy or otherwise. 

Richie never would have predicted that at 27 he would be living and working alone in a flat way tinier than his income demanded, but too chickenshit about normal human interaction to face the awkwardness of actually moving, or that the only friend he ever actually saw with his own two eyes would have calico fur and be named after a horse, or even that the only friend he regularly talked to would speak in an imaginary voice and smoke an imaginary pipe. But hey, what else was he going to do? Richie Tozier was a man who liked voices, and if they only place he could find voices was by putting them in his cat’s mouth then so be it.

Of course he was also pretty familiar with what those voices would say, considering that he was supplying the scripts. So he already knew that Dobbin would say that everyone is nervous the day before starting a new job, especially those who have always worked from home before. That these are just the standard nerves he can feel prickling under his skin, that they represent normal concerns rather that a dire prophecy of doom. He’d already told himself that several times without bothering to pass the script to Dobbin to do the voice acting. Didn’t mean he actually believed what he’s written.

Dobbin, evidently unsatisfied with the fact that he’d been written out of Richie’s latest crisis episode, rolled himself off the arm of the sofa with an ungainly flump, stretched his soft belly out and stared endearingly up at his housemate. Richie obliged and begin to gently tickle his fur. 

“Yeah Dob, I know that you’re adorable, and I know that maybe everyone gets a little bit like this and I don’t really have to hastily board my front door shut now in case tomorrow morning I become overcome by delusions of grandeur and think I could actually do the job and try and leave the flat or anything. But the thing is – ow!” Richie swore, snatching his scratched hand back from the cat.

_”No buts Richie”_ Dobbin chided. _“The only thing you have to remember is that you are good at what you do. You must be. You know this.”_ He gently hooked Richie’s hand with all four of his paws, and lightly tugged it back towards his belly to resume the stroking.

_“Now, how many years have you been making games?”_ Dobbin asked in the manner of a teacher asking a bolshy child what two plus two makes. 

Richie muttered like a grumpy child forced to admit that in fact two plus two make “Four.”

_”And how many games have you had released in that that time?”_

“Four. But…”

_”And how many of them were called ‘indie darlings for the horror crowd’ in the reviews?”_

“Well, four. But so what if the hipsters liked them? They like anything that’s weird or that has a beard!”

_“Hipsters can’t have generated all those downloads now could they?”_ Dobbin asked rhetorically, now softly nibbling on Richie’s fingertips. 

“Yeah maybe not,” Richie whined “but so what? They were flash in the pan mobile games, momentary distractions with lifespans as short…”

_“Of course they were”_ Dobbin interrupted, pushing Richie’s hand away and flipping himself back onto his feet. _“You made them by yourself at home. That’s why you took this job. Because you know that they’d be able to actually offer you the resources you need to make the games you really want. And frankly they wouldn’t be giving you these resources…”_

“Wasting these resources” Richie corrected vindictively

_”Giving you these resources”_ Dobbin continued unabated, _“if they didn’t think you could do something with them. So maybe you should face the fact that actually you do have some small measure of talent for this and accept that. No buts.”_ Dobbin finished forcefully, underscoring his point by turning around and sticking his own bottom in Richie’s face.

Richie huffed at this, and muttered his disappointment in himself for being bested in an argument by his cat’s imaginary voice and their (thoroughly unimaginative) bottom. He turned away, too ashamed to face that puckered eye from staring back at him. But still, he couldn’t help but feel those faint, hopeful lances of pride piercing his heart at Dobbin’s words, the desperate urge to grasp onto those achievements and hug them tight. Not for long though. Soon those fragments were drowned and dissolved in the tide of a thousand other internal voices picking those games apart thread by flawed thread. Desperate to justify this necessary self-flagellation, Richie returned himself to the spar once more, determined to win the duel to determine his downfall.

“Ah-ha! Your velvet tongue won’t work on me, you fawning feline!” Richie cried with masochistic glee. “This isn’t just ‘a job’ with ‘a company’ we’re talking about here. This is the Clubhouse Collective. AKA, the paws-down coolest , most innovative developer out there! Most people would give up their right arm – front-right leg in your case I suppose – to work there, and almost none of them would be worthy of it! Do you know the list of games they’ve made? The hits? The awards? There’s-“

Before Richie could commence with his memorised list, Dobbin silenced him by swishing his tail right into Richie’s mouth.

_”And how many of them have been horror games?”_

“…well, there’s, um, ‘The Silver Lady of Death.” Richie replied.

_”And what award did that win?”_ Dobbin inquired semi-rhetorically, wafting his tail around Richie’s nose.

“Worst ending of the year.” Richie sighed.

_”Exactly. Maybe, just maybe, you have something they need.”_ Dobbin concluded with a flourish, and with a final tail flick up Richie’s forehead, settled himself back down on the sofa. 

Temporarily defeated, Richie hurled himself back so he could lie sprawled spread-eagled on the floor in the proper dramatic fashion of a man who needed to express his immense discontent to his cat. His prone form lay there, stretched across almost the whole length of the room for several minutes, silent except for a few petulant puffs. Richie Tozier might not have gained a single inch in height since he was 14 years old, but that still left him stretched out at well over six foot and gangly as a gangplank. The hair was likewise the same drunken bird nest as it was during his teenage years, and he still had the identical gargantuan glasses and the same inability to grow a beard that was worth a damn. Only a couple of things really distinguished the man from the child he technically used to be, one was the small but growing ring of pudge around his middle, the other was the clothes he wore. As the years went on he’d tried to tone down the garish Hawaiian shirts in favour of outfits less likely to draw attention and fists his way, but had never really put in a full effort into developing an actual defined look. So today he was wearing all plain black, apart from the Crazy Frog socks peeking out from beneath his jeans. 

Richie begins to stare around the tissue box of a studio he lived in, looking for argumentative inspiration. He’d moved in here when he was 21 and living on a budget of shoestrings and a diet of super noodles, and hadn’t left since. As his income had increased over years, he’d filled it to bursting with tech and gadgets, some necessary for his job, some just things he’d thought looked cool. The walls were covered with overlapping posters, a careful collection of literally everything that had caught his eye over the past two decades. As he looked glazedly at a _Goonies_ poster opposite him, he was overcome with a sudden idea and quickly raised himself back up like an electrified Frankenstein, finger out and pointing ready to duel Dobbin’s tail once more.

“But this is the Clubhouse Collective!” he cried.

Dobbin didn’t even pause from licking a long stripe up his leg to throw a disinterred glace his roommate’s way, the look a clear enough tired expression of ‘You said that already’ that an imaginary voice wasn’t even necessary. 

“Collective. As in the single closest, most tight-knit gang of insiders in the field. It’s not…not as if I have the best history with cliques…is it?” Richie asked hesitantly, and with good reason. He’d spent half his childhood living out of a moving van thanks to his dad’s work, and all those years bouncing around from city to town to village to hamlet to campground to tin-pot shack in the middle of ass-all nowhere and back again, hadn’t ended up leaving him well-equipped to handle integrating himself into groups.

_“That’s right,”_ said one of the posse of theatre kids hanging out at the other end of the room. Ryan paused to emphatically flip his hair out of his face before continuing, _“At your audition you performed a medley of 25 impressions. One of each of us in the club.”_

“They were supposed to be funny!” Richie protested. “A gentle ribbing! Like that Bucky Beaver one you did of me!

_“Ugh,”_ Ryan protested nasally. _“That one was not supposed to make you laugh.”_

“Yeah I figured that out. Eventually.”

_“And let’s not forget that time in high school,”_ said one of the goths poking their heads out from the bathroom, _“when you tried to convince us you were hardcore enough to hang with us by wearing nothing but bright sunshine yellow, with a smiley face sprayed upside-down onto your t-shirt.”_

“It…was supposed to be ironic. I mean Wall-mart yellow is the most depressing colour there is, right?” Richie asked plaintively, despite already knowing his memory’s answer.

_“In kindergarten,”_ piped up the mop-headed six-year old perched on his windowledge, _“you decided fingerpainting meant that you should take off your pants and try and use your fingers to paint yourself a mermaid’s tail.”_

“You see!” Richie exclaimed, turning back to his cat and gesturing wildly to the empty room around him. “Look at what everyone says! This is isn’t something I can do! This particular skill department in my brain is empty! I don’t know how to work with people, let alone people like that. I don’t do groups, and they don’t have any interest in doing me either. They’re not going to listen to me, they’re not going to want me there, they’re not going to like me!”

His voice had been getting higher and higher, and he didn’t need to turn and look to feel the stare of the faces at his third-storey window. Each face was different, both hazy and sharp with memory, a cacophony of failed encounters just looking at him. They all wore the same expression, that bemused, recoiling sneer, a look that always told Richie the same exact message - ‘you fucked up again’. The look that told him that he deserved this look, that he’d been weird, or loud, or bothersome, or not-funny, or not-shutting-up, or not-going-away. The guilt at pissing all these people off crept up his spine, and he felt all those slurs, fists and knives being shoved into his face once more, and knew they were exactly what he goddamn deserved.

Defeated, he flopped back down on the sofa, and couldn’t keep the shameful childishness from lacing his voice when he asked, “What…what if they’re mean to me?”

Dobbin padded silently over him, clambered into his lap, placed his paws on Richie’s shoulders and nuzzled his head into his chest. Richie wrapped his arms around the cat, who began purring soothingly.

With the weight of his furry friend weighing him down Richie couldn’t pace around anymore, couldn’t get up to grab those 4 shots of whiskey he’d laid out to calm his nerves. He couldn’t even talk anymore for fear of disturbing the cat. All he could do was stroke softly, and run the pitch he had planned over and over in his head until sleep eventually took them both.

He dreamed of tomorrow, of what may be the greatest, or cruellest, opportunity of his life.


	2. Initial pitch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie arrives for his first day, meets his new coworkers and lays down his pitch for a new game.

It’s 10am the next morning, and Richie is standing outside the Clubhouse Collective’s offices with no idea how he got there. Well, obviously that’s not entirely true, he does know physically how he got there, not least because he’s had the route memorised for the past two weeks and checked it another three times this morning anyway, just in case GoogleMaps has been lying to him all this time about how buses work. But still he doesn’t have the faintest clue how he managed to get the stones together to actually go ahead with this journey, his new _daily commute_ he realises with a stab of terror, even with Dobbin’s encouraging mews echoing down the hall as left his apartment. Neither is he entirely sure how he pulled off the apparently simple task of travelling from point A to bus stop B without finding an innovative way to fuck it up too badly. He’d certainly forgotten to allow time breakfast into his schedule, and therefore arrived starving and panicked, before diving into the first place he saw open, which happened to be a sushi joint.

Now his breath stinks like fake wasabi, and he’s regretting not listening to his father’s advice to always carry a toothbrush with him wherever he goes. Richie asks himself if he should try and breathe less so his new coworkers don’t notice it, or if that’s just going to be super obvious and make him look like he can’t control his weird breath kink at work? Would they have even noticed the smell anyway? Do colleagues sniff each other mouths during the working day? Is that how jobs work? And another thing, why, when Richie is the tallest member of his family by a good few inches, does he look like a kid wearing his dad’s suit? Like seriously, this suit had to be a lot trimmer on him last time he wore it (high school graduation, 10 years ago) , and he’s grown since then (around the middle at least), so why does he feel like a little rascal on picture day?

Richie might have stood there all day, jiggling his leg and muttering to himself, if he weren’t very aware of the fact that his new workmates might well be looking at him from the windows. So with a few deep breaths and chanted Dobb-isms to himself, he turns his nerves to steel as best he can, steps forward and presses the buzzer by the nondescript door.

Alarmingly quickly the buzzer squawks back at him and the door swings open. With the final feeling that he’s plunging straight into the dragon’s maw being tempered only by the other feeling that standing there gawping at the door would represent an even more humiliating fate, Richie steps forward. The lobby would be equally as nondescript as the outside of the building, a plain white room with doors and an elevator but without reception desk, chairs or even a potted plant, if it weren’t for the large Clubhouse Collective logo on the wall opposite, each letter a loving mish-mash of different art styles. Normally Richie would love to pour over his favourite logo, now huge and three-dimensional, in detail like any true graphics nerd, but he’s rather distracted by the presence of two men before him, and the three rather troubling propositions they immediately press-gang into his mind.

First is the fact that neither man is wearing formal wear, making Richie feel like he is both overdressed and playing dress-up, like that one person who always puts way too much effort into a fancy dress party. The shorter man is wearing shorts and a polo, while the taller is in jeans and a baggy t-shirt.

The second thing Riche notices is that the taller guy is just…distressingly handsome. Like it’s almost stressful to look at, a breathing statue looking at him with an easy-going smile and shockingly well -manicured facial hai plastered on its perfect face. Richie can’t entirely tell, but he’s also pretty sure the guy has an equally well-sculpted body hidden beneath the voluminous fabric as well. He’s tempted to let out some sort of ‘Yowza!’ in response to the prospect of getting to look at something like that all day, but decides he probably shouldn’t.

Both of those facts would be distracting enough if it weren’t for the fact that the other man immediately snatches the remainder of his attention. Short, compact, but well built, like someone has decided to pack themselves efficiently into their body without wasting any space. The bonsai man-god has large doe eyes which are staring Richie down and a very cute face that is currently wearing the expression of a hyena guarding his kill. Richie doesn’t know what he’d say even if he could speak right now, so he settles for a shy wave-cum-awkward hand jerk instead.

“Hi!” the taller man says. “We’re the welcome wagon I guess. I’m Ben.”

“And I’m Eddie” short says.

Richie hovers for a moment before realising he has to say his own name back. “Richie. Nice to be wagoned – I mean, nice to um, meet you both.” He remembers to shake both their hands, but also remembers he has no idea how to actually do that. Recalling a blog post he’d used for research saying his handshake should be nice and firm he grabs Ben’s outstretched palm as strongly as he can, but kicks himself when sees Ben break his smile for a moment with a brief wince before covering it with an even wider grin. Richie hastily corrects himself and turns his hand into overcooked spaghetti when he shakes Eddie’s hand.

“So they sent me,” Ben continues, “because, and apparently I’m er…the least intimidating or something” Ben-the-Greek-god says in a thoroughly intimidating way.

“And me because I’ll be the one you’ll be working with most directly” Eddie adds, giving Richie a challenging look as he does so. Richie wants to ask them both if the whole ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine actually works when you tell the perp that’s what you’re doing, but decides he probably shouldn’t. 

“Take it you got here alright? You arrived right on time” Ben enquires politely. _25 minutes early_ Richie wants to respond, _all of which were spent bricking myself outside your office_ but decides that he probably shouldn’t. “Fine yes. Thanks” he says instead.

“You’re punctual. Good” Eddie says.

“Stan will love that!” Ben adds cheerily. “So anyway, welcome to the Clubhouse Collective. I know Bill already gave you the spiel over Skype, so I won’t bore you with it all again, but just to say we’re all really glad to have you here.” Richie resists the urge to look over and see Eddie’s reaction to those words. “But we’re a really a close-knit company as you know,” Ben continues “and we’ll get you introduced to everyone as soon as possible. But first we want to take you to the rest of the leadership team if that’s okay, because they all really want to hear your idea. Me included!” he grins.

Richie’s knees both give a little jolt at that, but he nods.

“Yeah, Bill’s been raving about it for weeks now” Eddie says, still staring at Richie with a mixture of curiosity, and like he thinks Richie is about to grab the gazelle corpse in his jaws and run away with it. 

“I know you probably expected we’d do all the paperwork, and HR stuff and get your building card and yada yada first, but that’s all boring, and we like to have fun here. Considering we make games and everything. So you good to get stuck in?” Ben enquires.

“No!” is what Richie wants to shriek. “Sure!” he says with what he believes to be measured enthusiasm. They all get into the elevator.

“Oh, one more thing while I think about it. Thanks for dressing smart, but we’re all super informal here, so just wear whatever you like from now on. Unless you like suits of course, in which case, carry on” Ben says.

“Yeah but I’m going to guess you don’t like suits” Eddie adds. “Considering you look like you’re dressing up in your dad’s clothes.”

Richie wants to guffaw at this, but swallows it down, and makes what he hopes is a polite laugh instead, while also berating himself for not practising his polite laugh enough. 

“You’ll have to excuse Eddie’s sense of humour” Ben chuckles.

Richie wants to jump up and down because the cute man made the same joke as him, but decides he probably shouldn’t. “It’s cool” he says instead, which causes Eddie to give him a curious look that he can’t decipher.

“We’ll show you round the office later, but this is the main floor” Ben explains as they emerge from the lift. Richie follows the other two to wherever they are taking him, but he can’t help the way his eyes bug out and swivel around the room. He might have though his flat was filled with a lot of nerd stuff, but this place is a different plane of nirvana altogether. There is a huge amounts of artwork from the company’s catalogue all over the place, both marketing material and concept work. Richie tries to take it all in at once and finds himself checking off the games he recognises at the same time, noticing as well that there’s a lot of artwork for projects he doesn’t remember at all. All he wants to do is run over and check it all out like a kid in a candy museum, but decides that he probably shouldn’t. What excites him even more though, is that in addition to all their own work, there’s a huge amount of imagery from a ton of other sources, a full anthropology of games, movies, tv and comics plastered over the walls. Each section of wall and cubicle each had their own style and focus, turning the office into a miasma of pop-culture mythology. Richie only had time to take in one long stretch of wall that was covered in model and pictures of video game birds – dozens of chocobos in every colour and hue, a proud looking Revali from _Breath of the Wild_ and an enormous mural of the Songbird from _Bioshock Infinite_ among them – before he realised that they’d arrived at their destination.

Richie wishes he had more time to spend scouring that Aladdin’s cave of pixelated treasures, but it’s now too late as he’s ushered into a conference room. The room is blindingly blank compared to where they just where, a white space studded with electronic and old-fashioned whiteboards, screens, sketchpads and flipbooks; all circling around a white ring table with one edge carved out if it – a space for the presenter to stand. It’s objectively a good creative empty space, but to Richie it looks like more a minimalist courtroom and Ikea torture chamber all rolled into one. 

Three of the four people sat around the table haven’t noticed the new arrivals yet. The short man with the questionable streak of red in his hair is sitting much too close and is much too absorbed in his conversation with the dark-skinned guy with the shoulders of two or three linebackers fused together sitting next to him. The slim man with curls is also too busy, hunched over the notebook he’s typing rapidly away at. The only woman in the room is also the only one to notice them, a redhead who is lounging comfortably in her chair with her feet up, the pose of someone who is genuinely at ease, rather than someone affecting to be so – it’s a pose Richie use to spend hours imitating without success. “Hi,” she greets, smiling, before glancing over at Ben and Eddie who are heading to what appears to be their usual seats (leaving no seat for Richie, just that spot bathed in an invisible spotlight), “thanks for bringing him up.” Ben mutters that it’s no problem, blushing at this slight praise and stumbling a little over his chair.

The noise causes the others to look up, and Bill lets out a little whoop and a delighted grin. “Richie Tozier! In the flesh, it’s great to see you! Thank you for coming in. Everyone – this is Richie.” 

“We know Bill” Mike says, flashing a grin at Richie so broad and pearly it would make Went proud.

“You’ve told us about him a dozen times already” Stan points out, fixing Richie with the inscrutable examination of a poker master.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Bill continues unruffled. “Richie, this is everyone. We’ve got here…” and he proceeds to introduce the others one by one. The names Richie already knows, but it’s good to be able to finally put faces and actual breathing bodies to these renowned names – Bill Denbrough and Mike Hanlon, the writers of interactive literary masterpieces; Stanley Uris and Benjamin Hanscom the acclaimed programmer and artist respectively; and Beverley Marsh and Eddie Kaspbrak, celebrated duo, the man who came up with the concepts and game designs and the woman who mastered playtesting and feedback so together they realised some truly outstanding games. 

Richie Tozier, no-name indie schlub, wants to squeal in delight at meeting his heroes, and run around the room asking them the roughly eight-million questions he has for them all. But he can’t do that, can’t do anything more than raise his hand in the imitation of a wave and mutter ‘hi’ after each name Bill reels off. He’s too busy side-eying that presentation spot, the one they’re going to ask him to stand in any moment now. The memories of all those other times he tried to impress the cool kids are screaming at him from outside the room to remember them, he can hear them hammering on the door, demanding that he recall just how badly he’d fucked up at every single one and for him to just realise the inevitable conclusion already that he’d just fuck it all up all over again. Sure Bill might have liked him through the filter of email and the prism of Skype, but this, appearing in the gangly flesh before him and his jury of legends, that was a different and painfully familiar story. Richie had refused to let the voices come with him to work today, he knew he shouldn’t be thinking of them, but he could _feel_ them nevertheless. They were the ones make his throat tighten, his leg spasm and his fingers twitch with the urge to run them through his hair, and they sucked all the moisture out of his mouth and moved it to his clammy palms, and Richie did everything he could to resist the temptation to clamp his eyes shut and jam his knuckles into them.

If these were imaginary people perched curiously around him, Richie would be able to handle it. He knew how to manage them, for the most part. But six real people, six real legends waiting for his pitch, that wasn’t something Richie knew what to do with. Real people didn’t let you course-correct like imaginary ones did, they presented no reset button when you inevitably put your foot in it. 

But then, just as he heard Bill ask if he was ready to jump right in and lay the pitch down, an idea came to him. He closed his eyes briefly, and opened them back up to find six very different people staring expectantly at him. Bill was now an elderly professor in a tweed jacket and a mass of bushy grey hair sticking out of either ear, while Mike perched next to him was now dressed up an elderly librarian, in a skirt and cardigan, glasses on a chain perched on her nose and a white beehive on top of her head. Stan was still rather robotic looking, because he was a child dressed in a cardboard-box robot costume, with the exact same expression still peering out from behind his cereal-box mask. Ben likewise was still gorgeous, a literal Greek statue, resting his head on his fist and holding a discus, wearing only a tasteful fig leaf for modesty. Beverley has become even cooler and even more of a queen – with both crown and sceptre, but also lounging casually on a Harley and smoking a joint, while Eddie looks exactly the same as before but really, really tiny, scuttling around on the table like a more professional Thumbelina. As Richie takes his place, he lets loose a slight sigh of relief. He’s rehearsed this pitch to silly imaginary judges a dozen times already, hopefully he can do it once more.  
“Okay. So it’s like this,” Richie begins heavily, looking around at the professor, librarian, cardboard robot, sexy statue, biker queen and furless Stuart Little around the table. His fingers are twitching and leg was jiggling only a little now. “It’s a survival horror with some RPG elements. We’re set in a small town in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, nothing around so we can contain all the action there easily. I don’t know if any of you ever lived in a small town”, there were nods in the room here, “but everyone knows everyone there. So we would have a distinct cast of NPCs, they’re all named, all have their own behaviour patterns and their own relationships with one another. Think _Bully_ if you ever played that.”

“The town is haunted by a monster. But none of the grown-ups are doing anything about it, not only are most of them assholes, they’re all under the monster’s spell to some extent or another, so they’re frequently antagonistic to the player. You can play as one of several kids, the only ones willing to do something about what’s happening. Each kid has their strengths and weaknesses, different abilities and different relationships with the townsfolk. You can swap out which kid you’re playing as, depending on what the current mission is. Sometimes you’ll be going by yourself, at other times you’re with one or more of the other kids. The relationships between them all will have to be really important, and we’d want the player to be invested in them. The kids you aren’t currently playing as could be AI-controlled, or we could maybe look into co-operative play.”

“The monster has total control over some of the townspeople, and sends them to attack you, which is where most of the enemies will come from. But of course, as a kid your strength is limited, and the emphasis is more on surviving than fighting. The real enemy though is the monster itself, who appears throughout as a recurrent boss you have to escape from or drive back, _Nemesis_ -style. It’s a shapeshifter and takes different forms, according to which kid you’re playing with – they all have different fears and the monster exploits them – so if the kid is afraid of beasts and werewolves, and savagery, that’s what the player faces. The monster can change the environment as well to match the kid’s fear, and it should be hard for the player to tell what is real and what’s an illusion, kind of like _Silent Hill_.”

“The main plot is trying to work out how to defeat the monster, what it is and where it comes from. All the various side missions are about trying to find out and exploit weaknesses, and they all build up to final massive fight like _Breath of the Wild_. The final level you have all the kids together at once for a huge boss battle where you finally have to put down the monster for good, who tries to turn the whole town against you in an effort to defend itself.” Richie finishes, breathing a little heavily and is faced with a wall of silence.

“And um…well, that’s it” he adds lamely at the end.

Silence.

Eddie glances at the others, and then looks directly back at Richie. “Holy shit” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should clarify that I really don't know a lot at all about video game development, and am making most of it up. But I like games, so here you go.


	3. Research...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie begins his new job. But he doesn't know why the Losers have hired him in the first place.

“Holy shit.” Eddie says.

“I know right!” Bill exclaims, bouncing in his chair like a sugared-up child. 

“Yeah I see now why you wouldn’t shut-up about this,” Mike says nodding thoughtfully. “This…could really be something.

“Exactly!” Turbo-Bill continues to vibrate. “It could really fix our horror problem, it’s got some open world potential, it’s got options for survival mechanics, you could…”

“I think the idea’s got some genuine soul behind it.” Bev jumps in. “The relationships between the kids could be full on _Last of Us_ level of touching, not to mention the huge increase you get in the fear and vulnerability of a survival horror if you’re playing as a child. I, for one, am digging this a lot. This is a beautiful little golden goose right here isn’t it? Is that just me, or does everyone else feel the same?” she asks looking around the table at them all in turn. She pauses when she reached Richie and gives him a soft smile, and he just wants to preen and strut up and down the room.

They like it. They really like it. The cool kids think his idea is cool, and by the transformative principle of coolness they think he’s cool.

They’re lifting Richie up on his shoulders and parading him around, while the crowd from _Rudy_ chant his name over and over. There’s ticker tape shooting through the air, and fireworks crackling above, and those pom-pom ladies are jumping up and down and someone is passing Richie an enormous shiny cup that has the words ‘Had a Good Idea’ inscribed on it and all those other things that Richie imagines that probably happen at sportsball games. 

Stan is peering at him from behind his screen, his hands flying across the keys and his eyes are a new kind of inscrutable. “There’s a lot of different player groups in this idea. I think if we play it right we can probably hit them all”. His voice sounds even, but Richie finds it hard to tell to be honest.

“You are getting all this down aren’t you Stan?” Eddie asks. “Because if Richie get’s hit by a bus tomorrow or something we really don’t want to lose an idea like this.”

“Hey fuck you Eddie” Stan deadpans. “I’m your lead programmer, not your damn secretary,” he says, giving Eddie a middle finger without even looking at him.

“Oh, I always thought of you more as our backup disk than anything else” Eddie shoots back to chuckles from around the room.

Richie wants to quiver with excitement. This…this is banter. Workplace banter that his workmates are including him in. That’s something you do with colleagues. Acquaintances even! This is even better than when they were lifting him onto the shoulders a moment ago, this is…inclusion. Maybe he could join in. Could he rib Stan as well? Is that something he’s allowed, is that appropriate right now? They’re cool with swears, but what backup-related joked does he know? Shit! Why didn’t he prepare any? He knew they’d be programmers here, why didn’t he prep any hard-drive humour he night before?

“Early days and everything, but does anyone have any sort of immediate preference for art style?” Ben enquires. “With it being from the perspective of kids, we could think cell-shaded? Helps with timelessness, could give it the right level of cartoony.”

“Yes!” Mike responds. “If the monster manifestations are all classic kid fears, then maybe we want the enemies to be archetypical mummies and frankensteins and so on.”

_No_ , Richie wants to say. _That isn’t how it should look at all. Of course the player should see it all from the perspective of a child, so the enemies should be larger and loom over you, they should feel overwhelming. But they need to look real. Childhoods in small-town suckvilles suck for real, they look real and crummy, and in your face, and you remember all those gritty little details so that’s what we should be showing the player. The illusions need to look real, not cartoonish, because they’re ILLUSIONS._

Richie doesn’t say any of this. Because maybe the cool kids aren’t cheering him on as he wins the big ballfoot game, or including him in their workplace-appropriate joshing. Maybe they are hyenas after all, and they’re tearing him apart. Stan is watching, coiled and ready for his moment to strike, and Eddie is going to hide the body and chisel his name off the idea, and then Ben and Mike are going to drag it back to the lab and mutate it, deform it into something twisted and silly and unrecognisable, and then…

“Hey,” Eddie calls out to him, giving him a curious look. “You’re on board with this aren’t you? Because we all really like the pitch, and we want to work with it. Do you want to help us with the project? You feeling good about working with us full-time?”

Richie is feeling a lot of things right now, but he doesn’t know which of those feelings are good.

“Sure,” he says, making his mouth grin. “I’d love to.”

***

The rest of Richie’s day is a whirlwind of forms, handshakes and mandatory fire safety briefings. He immediately forgets the names of almost everyone he meets. By the time he gets back home, he’s exhausted and more than a little worried this is how grown-up working life makes you feel. After a few seconds of internal debate he cracks open a beer, but isn’t sure whether to call it a victory beer or a commiseration beer. 

He sits on the sofa with his beer and Dobbin, sipping and stroking, and is not entirely sure what to make of his first day. They liked the idea and offered him a job, he knows that, but he can’t help but wonder _why_? Is it just for the idea? They could have written him a cheque and be done with it, that’s the outcome he half-expected. Why on earth do they want him to stick around like some sort of hefty limpet dragging them down? He hoped they didn’t expect more out of him, as who knows if a one-trick pony like himself could deliver again.

Dobbin offered no answers. Richie opened another beer and decided to call his parents.

It took three tries to get an answer because despite the fact that Maggie and Went insisted on using Skype, they didn’t have the faintest idea how to use it. Indeed, even when they did manage to press the green phone exactly like their son had told them, Richie could only see the top of Maggie’s pale forehead and the middle of Went’s chest.

“Hello Richard” rumbles the Went-chest.

“Hey! How’s my favourite boy?” enquires the wobbling Maggie-forehead.

“Hi Went, hi Mags” Richie responds, smiling fondly.

“So how did it go?” Went asks, and Maggie immediately follows up with, “Did they like idea?”

“Um…yeah. It went…good. I think they, er, liked it. Really liked it.”

“YES! I knew they would! Didn’t I tell you that they’d love it?” Maggie boasts, clapping enthusiastically out of view. 

“I never said they wouldn’t…” Went grumbles good-naturedly. “Well done son, I’m proud of you though. Really”.

Richie flushes. “Thanks.”

“You told them all about your dying-thriller right?” Maggie asks enthusiastically.

“Survival horror. And yes, I did.”

“And what are they like at this, Clubhouse Commune of yours?” Went says.

“ _Collective_. And yeah, they seemed good. Lot of new faces and names I guess.”

“Come on, come on, tell us everything” Maggie says.

“Alright. Well, there’s Bill who was the guy who contacted me…” Richie launches into a description of everyone he met and what they do, in the exact level of detail that Mags would demand. He’s just considering bringing up how unsure he is of how feels about them all, let alone how they feel about him, when’s he’s distracted by a loud popping sound.

“Wait, what was that? Are…are you guys drinking champagne?”

“Hell yes we are!” Maggie enthuses.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Richie asks anxiously.

“Sure it is. Gotta celebrate my baby’s first day! I mean this was your big idea they liked wasn’t it? The BIG one? Your baby?”

“Yeah I guess. It was kinda my baby.” His baby. That he’d just signed away to a bunch of people he’d never met before.

“Exactly! I mean not that you should be having an _actual_ baby at your age, but we’re both very glad they liked your concept-baby.”

“I’m 27 mom, not a little kid. I’m older than you guys were when you had me” Riche defends himself, as if the idea of having an actual baby wouldn’t be the most terrifying thing in the world for him.

“Yes, yes I know that, I know you could have technically had a baby anytime in the past 16 years, I used to do your laundry after all.”

Richie whines at that and covers his face in hands while his parents both chuckle, happy as ever to have mortified their only child.

“But seriously,” Maggie says after the laughter turns into a hacking cough, which she then drowns in a decisive sip of bubbly. “You’re happy with the job right?”

“Yeah,” Richie responds. “I guess I’m just…” Terrified? Petrified? Ready to crawl under a rock and cry because he doesn’t know what it is the company really wants from him and he’s even more scared of what the answer might be than he is of trying to find out? “Nervous. I suppose.”

“That’s perfectly natural.” Maggie soothes. “But remember – we love you, and they love your idea and they’re going to love you. Just relax and be yourself.”

“But maybe not, er, too much yourself.” Went interjects with, which earns him a “Went!” and a slap on the arm from Mags.

“I’m just saying…don’t push too much straightaway. Don’t say whatever is on your mind at first. Be polite. Get to know them. Work out what they like, and then you can start to, well, open up from there.”

Richie swallows heavily and nods. The back of his neck is prickling t his father’s words.

“I just want you to do well son. I’m sure you will.”

“Right. I will. Keep calm and carry on right?” Richie says and he ends the call as soon as he can. 

***

Over the next few days Richie would like to say that he adapted to his new daily routine, but, well, there wasn’t one really. To his surprise, and mundane pleasure, he did grow comfortable with the new commute quickly. It was different from his old pattern of just rolling out of bed and taking 5 steps to his computer, but he found he appreciated the enforced hour to jot down mental notes and go back over what he’d done that day in his head. But when at work, he wasn’t subject to the vigorous minute-by-minute schedule he assumed all office were obligated to run on. Instead each day was different combination of tasks, a multitude of different jobs, constantly being asked to run from a meeting with Bill and Mike pouring over horror short stories, to consulting with Ben about various sketches to lengthy discussions with Eddie and Bev, who keep pulling him back in for one more chat all the time. The R+D is all fun, much more fun than he ever dreamed of happening within a corporation, but Richie isn’t sure how he feels about being dragged from pillar to post, about everyone wanting his time and his opinion on everything. 

He’s following his Dad’s advice, working hard, but keeping pretty quiet. He answers questions when asked, but doesn’t try to push his thoughts any more than that. He laughs when someone makes a joke, but doesn’t offer any of his own. He doesn’t know how he feels about that either.

One afternoon, Richie finds himself sitting with Stan in his personal nook right along the bird wall, next to the cubicles of all the other programmers (all of which have their own decorative style, though Richie notes each of them has at least one chocobo in it). They’re playtesting a bunch of Clubhouse’s older releases, to work out which engine they want to use to base their current project off of. It’s pretty cool, just playing a bunch of games in turn, and Richie wants to poke fun at Stan for the way he switches on a dime from jotting down figures on a hideously-complicated looking Excel spreadsheet and then immediately turning back to the game and smack-talking Richie about he’s getting pwned at platforming. But the thing is that Stan keeps asking him opinion on the feel of the mechanics of each game, he turns to look at him when he speaks and he writes his words down verbatim on the spreadsheet. This wheedling for information, this surgical extraction of his ideas can’t help but feel familiar to Richie.

Maybe it’s due in part to the fact that Stan looks a lot like an older version of him, but Richie can feel the 14-year old form of Connor sitting next to him. He looks exactly like Richie remembers him, and when he looks down at own his hands gripping the controller they look just like they used to during his awkward (though maybe slightly less awkward than now) teenage years, with each nail painted a different colour with permanent marker. 

He’d met Connor when they’d both been at middle school together in…hell, Richie didn’t even remember which state, let alone which town he’d been at that point in his life. But they’d been a, cringe, school talent contest and Richie and Connor had both signed up to it doing stand-up. The school had put on a practice session where the volunteers could show each other their acts early on as a dry-run, without the whole school’s eyes on them. Connor’s act had been…pretty bad really, filled with lame dad jokes, though he’d had good energy. But Richie had been grateful to him, because he was the only one who stayed and laughed throughout Richie’s act when all the other kids had walked off rolling their eyes at some of the crasser gags. When Connor came up to him afterwards, enthusiastic as anything but offering suggestions, Richie had been over several moons with delight. And so they spent the next couple of weeks hanging out, lounging on sofas and playing games, while workshopping Richie’s act. Connor had ditched his set altogether, and instead offered his feedback on Richie’s routine, suggesting which jokes had maybe gone a little too far for a school audience, which ones needed work and how to get them into a better order to make the flow better. Richie had slurped the feedback and attention up with a spoon. Each time Richie came up with a new gag, Connor would laugh, pause the game and write the joke down in a notebook.

On top of that, they’d maybe been a...something…going on between them. In the years to come Richie would tell himself that he must have been imagining it, but at the time he couldn’t help but make note of all the times Connor had held his gaze longer than normal, or touched Richie’s arm when he made a joke, or the way their thighs pressed together on Connor’s hug couch, or that time he couldn’t work out why Connor’s eyes kept flicking down until he realised that his shirt had ridden up. Richie hadn’t done anything about these clues or the feelings in his belly of course, but he couldn’t help but think about what might happen if he won the contest. A party maybe, or just some time together, both flushed with excitement and success, then…well, maybe. That was the time when things were supposed to happen right? 

The day of the contest, Richie had been surprised but happy to see that his friend had entered after all, and was set to go on right before Richie. Watching from the wings though, he felt everything fall apart as Connor delivered his act. Word by word, joke by joke, pause-for-laughs by pause-for-laughs it was a perfect delivery of Richie’s routine. Richie never said another word to Connor, but struggled to hold back the tears every time he saw him in the corridors at school. He’d moved away two months later. 

Still being able to feel Connor sitting next him with the same smile he’d worn all those years ago, Richie continued to play with Stan for the next couple of hours. But he kept his answers as short as possible, and every time Stan would write one down Richie’s hands would tighten their grip on the controller and he would say nothing. 

***

For some reason, Richie finds that the only time he has to really fight the urge to keep his mouth shut is when he’s having a session with Eddie. Which on some level is surprising because Eddie certainly says enough for 20-odd people during the average meeting, and also because he makes no effort whatsoever to feign the level of politeness that the others do. Maybe Eddie wants to include him in the office banter? Or maybe they really are intended as insults, but none of them cause the usual chest constrictions that Richie normally feels when someone has a go at him, instead it’s more of a chest…fluttering? Sparking? Whatever it is, it’s an odd feeling, and one that certainly makes Richie want to speak right back.

A couple of days after the Connor haunting, Richie is having a one-on-one meeting in Eddie’s office. It joins onto Bev’s office, and is decorated with concept and fan artwork (the tasteful kind, not the other sort) of various video game healers – there’s _Overwatch’s_ Mercy, models of the Medic from _Team Fortress 2_ , twin paintings of Aerith from both the original and the remake and (rather controversially in Richie’s opinion) a huge sketch of Donald Duck. 

“Okay, sit your tall ass down,” Eddie says as way of greeting, before launching straight into it. “So, we need to start talking about how the combat is going to work, no exact mechanics of course right now, but getting a hold on what we want the player to feel from it. Obviously the best way of starting that is to identify what weapons we’re going to give the player, I was…”

“Hell no!” 

The words burst out of Richie’s lips before he can stop them, but it doesn’t matter, the urge to keep on crusading is almost inescapable, the anger snapping out of him driving his words on. _So he get his tall ass out of the chair, and instead leaps up onto the chair itself, so he’s looming over his foe beneath him, who immediately dodge rolls into a defensive crouch. “This isn’t a shooter we’re making here! The player needs to be scared, they need to be vulnerable during combat and that’s not going to happen if they’re overloaded with a swords and flintlocks now is it?” He launches into a powerful diving knee strike, and Eddie barely manages to scramble out of the way with a yelp, before Richie’s crushing blow strikes the ground where Eddie was standing a moment before with a resounding crash._

_“Or are you imagining we have a full selection of ridiculous kid weapons like in Stick of Truth or something? Absolutely not! They need to be. Something. You. Might. Actually. Find!” he shouts, punctuating each word with a throwing knife, forcing Eddie to twist and weave through the air to avoid them. “The player can’t win through their trigger finger,” Richie grits out, pushing his enemy back with strike after strike of his deadly lightsaber claws. “They have to win,” Richie grins, noticing that he’s forced Eddie back onto his own trapdoor, “using their wits!” He finishes his argument with a flourish, throwing his last knife right at the big red button on the wall, causing the trapdoor to open and his adversary to go plunging to his end in the mouths of his very own piranha-wolves far below._

Of course Richie doesn’t actually do or say any of that. Instead all that actually happened was that he said the words ‘hell no’ at a somewhat louder-than-necessary volume, and now Eddie is looking at him the expression of someone who has just thrown their arms out to protect a group of children from a rampaging were-beast. A swift, furtive guilt pours itself over Richie, though not quite enough to silence the steadily throbbing current of anger. “I, um,” he stammers out awkwardly. “I just mean, that…this isn’t a game where the player should look to just shoot themselves out. They need to think how to survive and, er, outthink the monster instead. At least…that’s what I think,” he finishes weakly, hearing the cringe in his own words.

“Yeah, I know that.” Eddie responds abruptly. Then he hesitates, and his voice softens a degree. “But you’re right. We’re not making _Doom_ here. But you’ve got to give the player the _option_ of a weapon. Otherwise, they just feel too useless without one. Did you ever play that section in _Tomb Raider Chronicles_? Or are you really telling me you don’t remember that goddamn section in _Resident Evil 4_ where you had to play as Ashley?”

The put downs oddly dampen Richie’s anger rather than inflame them, and he instinctively lets out a little “Leon! Help!” in a ridiculous voice. Eddie snorts and Richie’s heart does a weird jolting thing.

“Exactly! That’s what it feels like when you have no weapon at all. So we want to give the player one, but then make them only want to use it as a matter of last resort. Like, say, one of the kids smokes. We give that character a lighter – it’s not much use as a weapon, but the player could use it a pinch. But what they should be using it for is as a _tool_. You see?”

That ‘you see’ would have normally sounded chiding to Richie, the condescension of someone talking to an adult like they were a child, but instead it sounds almost plaintive beneath the steel. Richie’s never been so happy to lose an argument before, and something about being schooled so definitively, is certainly making him feel bucketloads of admiration for the man sitting opposite him, but also several other things. Richie doesn’t have time to guess what they might be though, because he’s much too busy with the deep dive discussion into weapons they’ve just launched into.

Neither of them notice that it’s two hours after closing time, till the cleaner asks them to lift up their feet so she can vacuum. 

***

Richie would like to think that afternoon helped the anger he feels prickling at the back of his throat, but to be honest with himself he’s not entirely sure that’s true. Half of the time at work he can feel Connor staring at him, and the rest of the time he can spot himself standing across the room, glaring at him, wearing Eddie’s clothes and telling him in great, fast-spoken detail about how all his ideas are worthless. Not that Richie has seen real-Eddie do anything like that so far, it’s just that he knows such a thing is coming. It must be. 

Has to be.

One week later, he Eddie and Bev are all crammed into Bev’s office, which feels like sitting in an elaborate, multi-coloured tent with all the different brightly-coloured costumes decorating the space. There’s an original sketch of Elizabeth’s outfit from _Burial at Sea_ , an elaborate, twisting mural of what Richie eventually realises is Bayonetta’s hair and even a bust of Lara Croft’s torso from the original _Tomb Raider_ , complete with huge pyramid boobs and a sticky note saying ‘Not this’.

Bev and Eddie have already launched into their double-act, and while they do both keep glancing Richie’s way, there’s no stopping their back and forth. Richie feels like a fifth wheel watching two masters at work.

“Okay,” Eddie begins, “I know every survey that you send out comes back with people saying they hate the Green Hill Zones and Bunny Meadows and they just want to get on with the game-“

“But if we ever take those levels out of the game,” Bev responds, “they actually hate it and are left with no idea what the mechanics are.”

“Exactly. So we need to give players a soft into, without hamstringing them with the tedium of giving them those dull beginning-of-an-RPG quests-“ Eddie says.

“’Oh please will you deliver this pot to my next door neighbour’” Bev says in the voice of a sultry maiden, and the look in her eye suggests that she spotted Richie’s failure to hold back a grin.

“Yeah none of that. But we need something for the player to get familiar with before the monster turns up.” Eddie pauses and turns to Richie. “I’m right in thinking you were envisaging an opening where the monster isn’t too obvious to the player right? Like not opening with a boss fight or anything?”

Richie nods, and tries to ignore the throbbing in his ears.

“So we should have any opening missions be about the kids doing something kids would actually do in small town life” Eddie continues.

Throb.

“Yeah, but it needs to feel genuine. No Roman Bellic and bowling please” Bev says.

“It’s going to rely a lot on the characters to sell it.”

“Which means Bill and Mike’s writing is going to have to carry a lot of it. I’m sure they’ll pull it off though. Probably by finding inspiration down one another’s throats as usual.”

Bev laughs before asking, “Do you think we’re looking for some idealised, cute small town feel then?”

Throb throb.

“Maybe we go full Spielberg quaintsville than then gets ruined by the monster?” Eddie says.

Throb throb throb.

“Oh yeah!” Bev responds enthusiastically. “We could-“

The throbbing anger pushes words out of Richie’s mouth unbidden once more, but this time as a whisper rather than a shout. “I don’t think it should be like that.”

Bev and Eddie both turn to look at him, and to his horror Richie realises he’s talking out loud this time, but he carries on regardless. “Look, you both grew up in small towns right? I grew up in all of them, and they all suck. They’re petty little places, and the player needs to see that dirt and grit. It should be known from the beginning that the town hates them, them and all the playable kids. All the others, the NPC kids and grown-ups, they should be treating you like trash from the beginning.”

“And yeah, we don’t want the monster just there, in your face from the get-go, but the player should be able to see it from their corner of their eye. Like something odd should be lingering around the edge of the camera, but turn to look directly and there’s nothing. You have a confrontation with an NPC and you can see something standing behind them, but when they move away, it’s gone. The player needs to know _why_ the monster chose this particular small-town shitheap. It tells the player from the beginning, that no one is going to help them, and it has to be down to the playable characters only to fix it.”

Richie slammed his jaw shut, with the sudden jabbing realisation of fear that this time he didn’t keep his anger in, or manage to drag it back into the safety of his imagination before it was too late, but instead he let the throbbing just spew out of him. He didn’t need any Voices this time to fuel the guilt that was crawling up from his stomach and dripping down from his brain to fill his throat. He’d done it again. He’d let this mouth throw away the filter, and it had all come out, and he knew that he had insulted Bev and Eddie, these legends, he’d spat his own stupid stupid ideas out and he’d hurt them, and they would hurt him, as they should, exactly as they should, exactly as Richie had asked them to do. He could see them having a frantic back and forth discussion with their eyes and Bev was speaking, saying…

“Good point. I think you might be onto something there.”

A couple more eye exchanges.

“Yeah. You’re right, that is what the beginning needs to elicit,” Eddie add. “Um…well, good job for interrupting us. We get like that sometimes.”

And he holds his fist out in what Richie thinks for one wild second is a terrible attempt to hit him, before realising what Eddie is asking for. Richie puts his fist out as well, and for the first time ever, he bumps it against someone else’s.

As he sits on the bus that night, the anger still throbs through him and guilt still lurks and twists inside, but somehow he feels…looser. Less conjoined. More…open maybe? He doesn’t know what it is, but he likes the feeling, and he likes the way he can still feel his knuckles tingling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise this won't all be video game references, but I had to get a few in early on.


	4. ...& Development

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie continues to meet the rest of his colleagues, and begins to rethink what he's doing here.
> 
> Also, Dobbin is back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Richie is learning. But learning is hard.

Come Friday night, Richie was sat at home, not working for the first weekend since he’d started the job. There was a firm lump of guilt squatting in his torso because of that, but there was also a fiery ‘fuck that’ that was keeping the shame trimmed. He’d spent all his free time sketching out ideas for the Collective, and all they’d done was take his work and run with it, so why should he continue to slave away for them like their video game maid? Of course, this angry thought was also contradicted by the buoyant feeling that bubbled in his chest whenever he worked on the project, or had a thought about their game or remembered a productive meeting he’d had with Eddie. Their game. 

His game. 

No, their game. His and Eddie’s and the others. The others, those people he feared and liked, revered and suspected, a constant, lurching tug and forth. He felt confused and unsure and ziggy and zaggy and he still didn’t have the faintest clue what any of it meant as he span round and round in his spindly chair.

The fact that he was pretty deep into a bottle of rose might not have helped of course, but the world was swirling around him quite pleasantly, being just tipsy enough to blur the tinges of his vision without jumbling his belly. The spinning wasn’t answering the question though, the mystery of why exactly the others were keeping him around – was it his idea? His work? His cheery personality? He span back around the other way and found no answers there either. 

So he slapped his socked foot down and came to a sudden stop. Peering into his zinfandel and swirling it around in a way that he hoped looked wise and reflective to his cat, he sent Dobbin a psychic message asking him to play devil’s advocate. With only a slight roll of the eyes, Dobbin pulled on his bright red devil Halloween costume, and wrapped his tail around the cheap plastic pitchfork that came with it. 

“So Dobbinelbub, why do you think they hired me? Give to me straight, I can take it. Hit me with it. Hard.”

_”They wanted your idea. That’s it. They took it and then threw you away.”_ the demonic cat hissed at him.

“Yeah but that isn’t true is it?” Richie pushed back. “They could have paid me off for my idea. They have the money, and for sure I would have taken it had they offered. So check that mate.”

_”Yaaar, that be true.”_ Dobbin responded, now wearing a pirate hat and eyepatch. _”But all that really proves is that they want more out of you, or my timbers aren’t shivering. Remember what Bev called you? The golden goose. Valuable booty you be, but booty is all you be. They’ll drain the well and be done with ye.”_ Dobbin finished by giving his peg leg a decisive lick.

Richie felt a spark jittering inside of him, a defensive instinct of some sort, a desire to circle the wagons and shoot back. It didn’t make much sense for him to want to protect his coworkers – sure, they were legends, heroes of his even, but that wouldn’t stop them from screwing Richie over as so many others had done. That’s how things worked. The useful took what they needed from the useless, Richie knew that, but somehow the way his cat was accusing _them_ of doing that…it seemed wrong somehow.

“Objection!” Richie shouted back, _Phoenix Wright_ -style. “That can’t be the case after all because they keep disagreeing with me. They talk over me and Eddie straight out tells me that my dumb ideas are dumb! So they can’t just be buttering me up and pumping me for oil now can they?”

_”Then they shall toss you back into the darkness where you belong,”_ Dobbin heaves out from behind his tiny Bane mask. _”The reason he calls your ideas dumb is because he thinks you are dumb. The only time they’re going to pay attention to you is to ground you down into the dirt of your cold and worthless suggestions, and…”_

Now this spark made even less sense, but somehow Richie wanted to defend _himself_. There was something about this job that made him feel as if some of the things he said had actual weight to them, merit, something that made them worth SOMETHING.

“But they keep listening to what I say, and wanting my time, and asking my opinion. So it can’t just be dirt to them…can it?”

_”So what then?”_ Dobbin grated from behind his Kylo Ren mask. _”If they don’t think your work is worthless, and they don’t just want to exploit it – what then?”_

“I…don’t know.” Richie lets out a frustrated sigh, kicks once and lets the momentum give him one slow spin. As he comes to a juddering halt, he finds Eddie, Bev, Stan, Bill, Mike and Ben all heaped on the sofa around Dobbin, who is dressed as himself again.

_”Dude. Have you ever considered the fact that we just like working with you?”_ Eddie asks. 

And there’s something about that that Richie wants to seize. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but he can’t escape the fact that it fits the evidence. When two and two make five, you have to accept the fact that maybe you’d been getting maths wrong all this time.

_“It doesn’t mean they like you though.”_ Dobbin says softly. 

Richie shrugs that off. Of course it doesn’t, but neither does that matter. They like working with him. He inflates with a new sense, a feeling of something that fits into every nook and cranny and puffs them up with lightness. 

It takes him a while to recognise it as respect.

That is something he keeps coming back to that weekend. As he drinks more wine that night and the night after. When he does laundry. Or sketches out a few drawings to show Ben, or when he jots down talking points to raise with Eddie. When he calls him parents, only to find out Maggie is to tired to talk right now, or even when she calls him back later looking perky, but still dozes off after a few minutes.

He can’t stop from muttering the word ‘respect’ to himself, rolling the word around in his mouth and liking the way it feels.

***

The next week at work, everything just feels easier somehow. More comfortable. That suspicion that coiled itself around his muscles, the anaconda that whispered accusations about his coworkers into his ear was gone, its body stuffed on his respect -mantle back home. 

Now Richie knew for sure that they still didn’t really like him, but that was just fine. They were unfailingly polite to him, and he realised that courtesy did not translate to affection by any means, but it did at least signify a level of esteem which made him want to preen at every compliment he received. Eddie meanwhile, who Richie spent by far the most time with, was rather clearer with his dislike, as his bluntness was decidedly NOT courteous by any stretch of the imagination. The jabs about Richie’s height and fashion sense were handed out on a regular basis, and Richie was sure every ‘Good idea Richie’ that Eddie said was seasoned with a healthy dose of sarcasm. Nevertheless, Richie liked to imagine that Eddie was just including him in the same banter that he engaged in with all the others – Eddie certainly seemed to use insults as a show of endearment – and so he found that he enjoyed their sessions together the most. Richie hadn’t felt this content in years. 

Naturally, he knows better than to try and join in with the fantasy banter. The death of the suspicious anaconda means that he no longer has to police what he says in terms of suggesting ideas or critiquing those of the others, while the respect is pushing his opinion out of his mouth without any of the careful filtering it used to receive. But he still makes sure to guard the joke filter, a 50-foot concrete wall topped with barbed wire and bordered by a deep moat filled with crocodiles whose mouths are filled with piranhas, in order to ensure that the only those comments with the absolutely unhumorous and straightest laces possible get through. They may like working with him while he stays serious and gets on with it, but countless past experiences have told him perfectly well that goofing off and trying to act like a friend will absolutely change that for the worse.

When he’s called to Bill and Mike’s offices one morning he knows well enough to be on his best behaviour, despite the temptation otherwise. Like Bev and Eddie, Bill and Mike have adjoining rooms. Mike’s is also the staff library, and it’s filled to bursting with shelves groaning under the weight of his book collection, an eclectic mix of everything from sci-fi to fantasy to witchcraft. Bill’s meanwhile is a lot more minimalist, the only décor being fragments of dialogue for various game scripts neatly stencilled onto the white walls. Both of them seem happy to work in either space though, and they spend half their time launching their wheelie chairs from one room to the other, just pushing off and hurling themselves through the door without warning. It looks like fun, but Richie always makes sure to stand up and walk his chair whenever he has to follow them around. 

When he can keep up with them, there’s something very adorable about watching how they interact. Whether they’re pitching lines back and forth, arguing or just sassing one another, they’re always touching, a constant tactile contact. It’s quite endearing about the way Bill gets heated when defending his plotlines, raising his voice and swearing a lot, while still casually playing with Mike’s fingers. Richie can’t even bring himself to feel jealous of them, having this level of casual intimacy would be so clearly unattainable for a man like himself that it would be like being envious of someone who has their own pet dragon – a level so far out of reach that merely being able to watch it is privilege enough. But boy does Richie want to poke fun at them. There’re so many options – the classic pretending to puke every time Mike runs his hand through Bill’s hair, or maybe just making kissy faces, or perhaps just going straight out and asking faux-seriously for a threesome. All of them make Richie giggle in his head, but letting any of them out past the filter would surely result in disgusted looks and uncomfortable silences, so he keeps them all safely under lock and key. 

They’ve asked him to have a look at a scene they’ve been writing, one where the kids are telling one another about all the weird things they’ve been seeing for the first time, and it’s…well, the writing is _technically_ good he supposes, but….

“You guys were children once right?” he asks, looking up from the screen.

“Er…yes…?” Bill answers hesitantly.

“Like you weren’t just born fully grown with an apartment and a mortgage or anything? Because I don’t think kids really spend this much time monologuing about the ‘duality of man’.”

Bill scratches the back of his head ruefully while Mike chuckles and pokes him in the side.

“And Mike man, I’ve got to tell you that most youths today don’t actually have such an extensive knowledge of Slavic folklore.”

Mike looks a little surprised about this, but Bill just grins and socks him lightly in the shoulder with one hand, while squeezing his thigh with the other.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Mike says after a few moments. “Remember that summer when you tried to cure you stammer by saying twenty different ‘fuck’ tongue twisters every day?”

“Oh yeah!” Bill exclaims. “’The fucking fork freaking fracks the fucking fractal’. Though to be fair, for a 12-year old you did know a lot of weird folk stories.”

“Blame my grandad for that. I supposed I was a bit of an exception. So what do you think it should look like?”

Richie blanches for a moment, and has a brief urge to slam the wall back down and say nothing, before grabbing Bill’s keyboard and beginning to type. 

“I think the kids don’t necessarily want to let on how scared they are, they don’t want to appear babyish to one another. So they’re going to try and make jokes about what they’ve seen, even though secretly they really want someone to help them. Maybe Kid A then says something like _Yeah so this thing was big…like really huge and this great big enormous mouth and this long wet tongue that was snaking around like it was trying to find me, like it was like a lizard or something right? Kinda reminded me of your mom really._ ”

“And then Kid B would have to respond back with a _Hey fuck you! But the thing I saw was smaller, but like everywhere, all at once. You remember…you remember how when you were little and you thought there was something living in your bedroom closet? And you couldn’t see it properly, just this pair of red eyes squinting out at you? You like, thought you could hear it breathing. I called them…um, grumblesharks. Which was dumb I know, but whatever. I don’t believe that anymore. Duh. But…I could still see one there in the closet. And at the window, and in my locker at school, and when I was walking home, and…everywhere. They were just like watching me. Perving on me, just all the fucking time. It’s stupid right? I mean I’m not, like going to be a wimp or anything…but I guess…well… these fuckers are just…I’m kinda scared of them.”_

_Kid A leans over and squeezes Kid B’s shoulder. “Yeah me too bud.”_

_They sit in silence for a while, both swinging their legs in time, before Kid A pipes up. “Not as scared as I am of your mum though.”_

_“Fuck off!”_

“That’s the sort of dynamic we should be going for I think.”

Bill and Mike both nod thoughtfully for a moment in sync, before starting to talk over one another excitedly. Richie doesn’t have to say much for the rest of the meeting, because he’s already set the two writers off. He sits back and watches as they shoot possible lines back and forth, and Mike hurtles his chair back into his room to grab a few books, and Bill begins to draw graph lines on his whiteboard, calling out to Mike on how exactly he thinks the jokes-to-serious-shit ratio should change as the plot develops.

Richie is perfectly content with it all, glad he managed to contribute without having had to make a single joke. 

***

That afternoon, Richie is required to attend a meeting with Ben, who Richie has spent by far the least amount of time with so far. Ben has his work area with the other members of the art team, directly across the development floor from Bev. He’s decorated his work area with pictures of various levels and sections from games – beautiful concept art of buildings, but also detailed technical drawings of how the level design was accomplished, with a prominent series of images and diagrams depicting the Scarecrow nightmare sequences from _Arkham Asylum_ attracting Richie’s eye. It makes his head swim just to look at.

This is part of the reason why Richie has been avoiding Ben, despite the fact that Ben should be working closely with him and Eddie on level design. But Richie has never been very good at this aspect of the process, he was able to envisage a feel and the basic sequence for a quest perfectly well, but struggled to work out how to actually accomplish it. The reviews of all his old titles were always pretty clear that this was a weakness, and while Richie could blame his lack of technical resources when he was working by himself, he also knew perfectly well that his own inadequacies were probably more to blame. He’d gotten pretty firm idead on what sort of missions the player should be offered, and the places they should take place in, but didn’t know how to actually build these structures; while he had a strong vision on the sort of illusions the monster should create, he didn’t have the foggiest as to how they were going to accomplish them.

Coming up against someone who could do what you could not, who could do it _easily_ , well that was pretty scary, because at any moment they could tear away the veil and expose your worthlessness for all to see. Though as Richie has become more (somewhat more) confident that the others did actually want to keep working with him, this conversation seemed harder and harder to keep putting off. Because he’d begun to find something almost comforting in the fact that there were people around him that could accomplish what he couldn’t, and that while the workday still carried with it all the nerves that came with an unanaesthetised surgery, there was something relieving in knowing that he didn’t have to pick up all the slack. 

So as they sat there, with Ben explaining in length how he thinks the illusions would be better accomplished not by removing and adding assets when the camera isn’t looking, but rather by re-skinning them as it would then be easier to show transformations when wanted, Richie is perfectly (relatively) happy in the fact that all he can do is sit there and nod and make affirmative noises. Ben at least seems pleased enough, smiling throughout and even blushing slightly when Richie declares the idea to be “fan-fudging-tastic.” With Ben having done all the work already, the meeting goes by pretty quickly, but just as they’re wrapping up, Ben clears his throat and says, “We’re all really glad you decided to take the job here. Seriously.”

Richie is no longer getting so suspicious when something like this is said, but it still makes him uncomfortable, so he lets out a quiet ‘thanks’ and hopes that’s it. But when Ben continues with a highly casual-sounding “So, do you have any long-terms plans?”, that’s when the fear-python begins to make its presence known again. 

“Um…why, do you think I’m planning on, er, taking over and replacing you all with…robots or something?” Richie asks haltingly, which pulls a chuckle out of Ben. 

“No, nothing like that. I was curious that’s all because I used to be in the same boat,” Ben says.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that I used to be the new kid. They originally brought me in to do some consulting, and then they asked me to stay and I felt I couldn’t say no.”

“How come? If, um, you don’t me asking or anything.”

“Well, obviously the company is just so good at what they do, and everyone was really nice and…I guess…because of Bev” Ben finished his sentence rather abruptly and turned a deep shade of crimson. There was something so endearing about it that even though Richie had a deep and rich fear of asking people about their relationships, and indeed no concept of what they really consisted of, couldn’t help but say, “Awww”, and instinctively go to prod Ben in his side, before thinking better of it and dropping his finger.

“I’m no expert, but if it helps Benny, I think she might be into you too.”

Ben blushes harder. “Yeah I figured that. Eventually.” Embarrassed-looking he raised his hand and shows Richie his ring, a simple gold band with tiny Triforces etched onto it.

“Woah. I mean, congrats and everything, but…wait, are you guys all married to one another? You and Bev, Bill and Mike…are Stan and Eddie…?” Richie asks, a mysterious twisting sensation in his gut.

“No!” Ben exclaims, rather loudly. “Stan is married, to a really lovely lady, but she doesn’t work here. Eddie is single though,” he says, giving Richie a very pointed look, though Richie just nods politely, because he has no idea what the point is.

“But, didn’t you say everyone was really welcoming? Because, shi - _shoot_ , not that you guys aren’t welcoming or anything, you’ve all been great and everything, like every single one all the time. It’s just…you know, Stan and Eddie are…er…”

“Deadpan and yappy respectively? Yeah, I know” Ben says, much to Richie’s relief. “Stan is always like that, it took me a long time to learn how to spot the difference between how he is around his friends and how he is around everyone else. But then after I joined full-time, he brought me a series of t-shirts that said ‘New Kid on the Digital Block’ in the _Minecraft_ font, one for every day of the week, and I began to figure it out. When it comes to Eddie meanwhile, spotting when he thinks of you as a friend is a whole lot easier. When I was just starting as a consultant he was a pretty cold fish. Polite enough, but businesslike you know, purely professional.”

“What changed?”

“He began insulting me all the time. First time he called me a dumbass…that was nice.”

Richie spends quite a lot of time thinking about his conversation with Ben. Some of it is just dwelling on how nice Ben seems to be, and the comforting warmth he seems to emit like a shy space heater, which makes Richie feel a little foolish for how intimidating he used to think he was. Not that Ben isn’t somewhat intimidating or anything because Richie did have eyes after, and anyone who looked like that couldn’t not intimidate you a little bit. At one point he’d reached up to grab something off a shelf and exposed a little of the abs that sat underneath his baggy t-shirt, and Richie had had to spend the next five minutes mumbling and staring at the floor.

But Richie also couldn’t help but think about what Ben had said regarding Eddie, because it didn’t make any sense. Eddie had been teasing him from the beginning and had called a least a dozen of Richie’s ideas ‘dumbass’ so far. So what on Earth did that mean? 

__

_***_

__

Richie is pretty proud of the fact that he hasn’t made any jokes so far. He’s followed Went’s advice, kept his head down and worked hard, been honest with his opinion but filtered everything he’s said and earned his colleagues’ respect without making a Richie of it and pissing them off. But when it comes to Eddie, the temptation to pull that filter off and shred it into tiny little pieces is just so alluring. Richie still can’t figure Eddie out in the slightest, especially after what Ben said, and he isn’t even sure if Eddie is insulting him or teasing him, but goddamn does it make him want to fire back. He spends his nights thinking of comebacks and putdowns, practicing their delivery and then never once using any of them. Half of the time at work, he feels like he’s just resisting the urge to poke and needle, just to get a reaction out of him. 

__

Whenever Eddie is pissed off at a computer or other ‘inanimate fucking object’ not working, he starts doing these furious, incomprehensible whispered mutterings that sound like Joe Pesci from _Home Alone_ , and Richie is almost overcome by the urge to do something to redirect those mutterings towards himself. Sometimes Eddie will get into a full-on impassioned rant about bad video games, the words avalanching out of his mouth as he strides around the room and karate chops the air for emphasis, and Richie is desperate for the chance to try out the impersonation of it he’s been practising, preferably in front of a non-feline audience for the first time. But then he thinks better of it, and just nods along to whatever Eddie is saying. Sometimes though, Richie catches Eddie glancing at him mid-rant before he darts his eyes quickly away again, almost as if he is trying to see how Richie is reacting. It reminds Richie of when he was young, and he would cast furtive little looks at the other kids when he was doing an impression or a bit to see if they liked it (they didn’t). Then again, maybe he’s just projecting, he’s read online that’s something people do. 

__

One lunch break, after a particularly stressful morning, Richie is decompressing by playing some _Totally Accurate Battle Simulator_. He’s alone in what seems to be becoming his and Eddie’s shared office, Eddie having announced that he was heading out to the sandwich shop for lunch (as he likes to tell Richie at the start of every lunch break for some reason). So being free from eyes whose respect Richie needs, he feels pretty comfortable in engaging in one of his favourite hobbies – speaking in silly voices while committing large-scale rag doll massacres. He gets pretty into it as usual, and has just finished doing the gruff old king’s wheezy death-rattles at the hands of the surprisingly squeaky-voiced mammoth, and is now playing the role of Horace the Hobbit encouraging his fellow halflings to sacrifice themselves gloriously in the dragon’s flame, when he hears a weird sound that makes his heart stop in a way that is simultaneously both terrifying and elating. 

__

He turns around to see Eddie standing at the door holding two paper bags and a couple of drinks, and making a sound that could only be described as…well…gigglesnorting. 

__

Part of Richie naturally wants to throw the mouse across the room and claim he was actually studying, the way he did all those times Maggie would barge into his teenage bedroom unannounced _again_. But a far larger part of him is screaming at him to keep on doing the voices because Eddie’s expression, his flushed face, heaving chest and the way he is desperately trying to hold back those ridiculous noises – that’s a sound Richie wants to hear every day for the rest of his life. It doesn’t matter if Eddie is laughing with him or at him, he just wants it to keep on happening, even if he doesn’t know why he wants it. 

__

He’s about to start the Horace voice again when he thinks better of it. In fact, ‘thinks’ probably isn’t the best description, it’s more that he _feels_ better of it. The sensation of his plug being pulled out is sudden and unexpected, but nevertheless he falls silent, turns back to the screen and hunches in on himself and exits the game, because the instinct to make himself small and unnoticeable and unbothersome is kicking in hard. He barely hears Eddie’s protestation, and doesn’t want to hear what it was he was saying anyway, so he awkwardly excuses himself to hurry to the bathroom and splash water on his face and berate himself in front of the mirror. 

__

When he comes back 15 minutes later, Eddie doesn’t say anything. Richie gently nudges aside the bag and the drink that Eddie has accidentally left on his side of the desk and gets back to work. 

__

That night as he lies in bed letting the shame soak in, he doesn’t think of respect, or practice routines for an imaginary Eddie. Instead he just stares at the ceiling and tries not to dwell on the sound of giggling

__


	5. Teambuilding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie is forced to go on a night out with all the others.

Richie is sat in what could technically be called his and Eddie’s office, attempting to clear out his ballooning inbox and studiously trying to ignore the furious whispered conversation coming from just outside the door. In the window he can see the reflection of Eddie and Bev having one of their patented expression arguments, where they angrily debate things through the medium of eye rolls and pointed looks, though it appears this time they have also added in the occasional hushed sentence and accusatory gesture. There is a steady twinge of curiosity in Richie’s brain, but he knows this conversation isn’t his business, so he tries to shut it out and focus on his messages. Things are still a bit awkward around Eddie. Not as bad as the day immeidately after GigglegateTM, when Eddie spent the whole day looking nervous and handled Richie with like he was wearing oven gloves, but their conversations are still rather stilted, and Richie is ruthlessly enforcing his filter to ensure that nothing like that happens again. Making Eddie laugh is not his business.

After a few minutes, the argument apparently comes to a resolution and Eddie walks in, sits down and immediately begins typing. Fifteen seconds later he clears his throat, and says in a decidedly casual voice, “This Friday we, the leadership team that is, are going to have a night out. It’s something we try and do pretty regularly, to have a night off with no work whatsoever, and just have fun.”

Richie looks over, and realising that he’s supposed to acknowledge this random statement, says “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Eddie continues now looking directly at him. “Everyone always lets loose, and normally gets very drunk, and then we spend the next morning nursing hangovers and trying to remember what on earth happened by comparing photo rolls. The place we go is very cool, they know we’re regulars and what’s we’re looking for.”

Richie has no idea why Eddie’s telling him this. After a few awkward moments, Richie decides that a statement of approval might be appropriate. “Sounds cool.”

“Yeah, it’s cool” Eddie says, acknowledging that it’s cool that Richie thinks the cool thing is cool.

“Cool” Richie responds, confirming the cool.

Eddie looks a little frustrated, but turns back to his laptop and types rapidly for another thirty seconds, before getting up and going to Bev’s room, and commencing another hushed argument. Richie goes back to work and puts his headphones on. Not his business.

Over the next couple of days, Richie keeps finding himself wandering into rooms only to find the others having loud conversations about their past nights out. There’s a lot of different stories that are being circulated, almost all of them accompanied by in-jokes and raucous laughter, but a few common anecdotes do seem to keep cropping up. There’s the time they all had to invent a new cocktail in 5 minutes, the spontaneous drag show and one very mysterious event that is simply referred to as The Parrot Incident. Richie is reminded of college, when he frequently found himself sitting silently while his classmates recounted some awesome-sounding experience that he’d missed out on. Initially he’d thought that they’d all been doing it deliberately, trying to rub his nose in all the fun they’d been having without him, but eventually he’d realised that was rather egotistical of him – it’s had never been about him at all, they simply ignored the weirdo in the corner. At the time being ignored like that felt comparatively better, but now it just makes him small. Still he doesn’t say anything, accepting that all he can do is get on with his work and grin quietly at some of the more ridiculous anecdotes. It’s not his business to do otherwise.

On Wednesday Bev strides into the office, ignoring Eddie’s panicked look and the weird flapping gesture he’s making like he’s trying to shoo away a fly, grabs a chair and sits down alarmingly close to Richie.

“Hi” she says, her face remarkably few inches away. 

“Hi.”

“So, this Friday. You in?”

Oh. Richie hadn’t been expecting this. Why on earth would Bev ask him such a thing? This doesn’t make any sense. He glances at Eddie briefly in the hope that perhaps he holds the answer, but he is just typing away, watching the interaction out of the corner of his eye with an inscrutable expression. Is Bev trying to trick him or something? If he says yes, will they lure somewhere and make fun of him, dump pig’s blood on him and steal his kidneys? No, that doesn’t seem very likely, Richie doesn’t think people actually do things like that, at least not people as nice as these guys. Perhaps it’s a way of finding out if he’s planning on gatecrashing, so they can head him off now and make it explicitly clear that he’s not invited? That would explain Eddie’s reaction. Or maybe it’s an obligation thing? They’ve realised he’s heard them all chatting about it, felt guilty and are now duty-bound to invite him along. That’s…genuinely nice of them. Richie is touched. The laws of mutual niceness dictate that he declines the invite, in order to make everyone feel comfortable again.

“No he says.

But judging from the taut straightness of Eddie’s shoulders, his response hasn’t helped Eddie return to post-obligation comfortability, so he adds on a polite “Thank you though.”

“How come?” Bev enquires, also politely. 

“I’m, um, busy.”

Bev graciously raises one eyebrow.

“I’ve got to call your – I mean, my mom.”

“All right then,” Bev nods, stands up and leaves he office, exchanging one half-a-second look with Eddie that feels like it lingers for five minutes.

On Thursday Ben also brings it up, much to Richie’s alarm. They’ve just finished their meeting and Richie has already put his laptop away, forcing him to fiddle with his pen instead to help relieve the pressure of Ben asking him awkward questions.

“So I hear you can’t make it on Friday?” Ben asks.

“Um, no. I’m busy. Alas” Richie responds, avoiding eye contact.

“Ah, that’s a shame man. Next time then?”

Richie hums noncommittally.

Ben nods thoughtfully before saying, “You know, I was bricking it the first time they invited me. I didn’t really have any friends, and then all of a sudden this lot want to drag the new kid out on this big night out. I kind of thought they were all going to pants me and steal my lunch money or something” he chuckles, and then upon seeing Richie’s look, adds on “I kind of had a rough time in middle school.”

“But it ended up being a hell of a good time. Don’t remember all of it of course, though I’m sure that’s good sign. We played a lot of games, drank just way too much and sung more karaoke than was entirely seemly.”

Richie feels a slight pang, because all of that does sound like it could be enjoyable. Objectively speaking, those are entertaining activities after all. Richie likes games of course, and he’s no stranger to the pleasurable relief that liquid intoxication can offer. He does even enjoy karaoke, if ‘karaoke’ is an appropriate descriptor for those times he’s had a lot of tequila and spent the evening dancing around the flat with Dob in his arms, both of them singing their hearts out. Sometimes Dob has even let Richie use his tail as a microphone.

But the idea of doing all of that in front of everyone else sounds terrifying. Just because he enjoys doing all of that doesn’t mean that anyone else should be obligated to watch him enjoying it, he would look like a fool and it would be rightfully humiliating. He’s just been able to earn everyone’s respect, trying to hang out with them all and have a good time would just flush all that respect down the world’s fastest flushing toilet. Staying home is the best thing to do here, and he’ll still get to hear the stories on Monday morning if he’s lucky. He scolds himself for not feeling more grateful. 

He’s feeling should-be-happy about the stay-at-home-and-pretend-you’re-busy-because-that’s-best-for-everyone plan all the way up until the end of the workday on Friday. He’s just about to leave the office when Bill bumps into him in the corridor, and offers his hand up in what Richie eventually realises is an offer for a high five, and not a weirdly obviously telegraphed attempt at a slap.

“Richie my man, you’re coming tonight right?”

Richie stops dead, and Eddie, who is putting on his jacket, pauses and looks over.

“Oh, no I’m busy you see. Sorry.”

“No way dude! You have to be there, this is a big thing for all the leadership team. Mandatory attendance for sure, right Eddie?”

“Right.”

_So why are you asking me to be there?_ Richie asks to himself. _Am I on the leadership team? Does it say that in my contract? Shit, was I supposed to read that thing?_

“Don’t worry, you’re going to have such a good time, you’ll love it. Bring your game face though buddy! Wooo!”

And with that Bill, who is apparently an enthusiastic woo-er, gives Richie a hearty slap on the back, then glances over at Eddie with a slight smirk on his face and gives him a nod, before running off down the corridor to hold hands with Mike and walk out chatting about tonight’s plans.

Eddie tells him that he’ll see him there and leaves. Richie isn’t entirely sure what happened, till he feels his phone vibrate, and pulls it out of his pocket to see a message with an address, a time and the words BE THERE followed by an incomprehensible string of emojis. 

Shit.

***

Back at home, Richie has a minor freak-out. Minorish. He alternates his time between frantically googling ‘what to do on a work night out’ and rifling through his meagre collection of nice shirts that he bought a decade ago in the naïve expectation that he’d get an opportunity to wear some of them at college. None of the information he finds is very useful, other than a general advice to arrive ‘fashionably late’, though none of the sites tell him what exactly that means or why fashion is in anyway related to chronology. 

The worst thing is the fact that he has no idea what to expect from the evening. Is it going to be a night of dull conversation while everyone makes small talk and regales everyone with humblebrags about their new car or their dogs or something? Or some ghastly teambuilding exercise and carefully regimented mandatory office fun time? Because sitting at home alone with his cat not talking to anyone does sound infinitely preferable to either of those. Even if it does turn out to be the sort of epic rager that the others have been talking about, and therefore hypothetically enjoyable, it’s not exactly something that Richie is going to be able to indulge in now is it? Sure, wild drunken shenanigans are the bee’s knees when you’re doing it with friends, but Richie is pretty sure it would be no better than a wasp’s ass when these poor friends are forced to do it with a _workplace colleague_. Being compelled to face the tiresome obligation of having to invite the weird kid to your party and let them join in the games is not something most people relish, as Richie learnt the hard way. He has more than enough memories from elementary school to know that, and the most important thing that all those birthday parties drove home was that he is not someone who should be allowed to let loose in public, because Richie Tozier is not a boy who knows how to stop. If he lets himself have fun, lets the guards have the night off and his mouth say whatever it wants, then at least one kid will end up crying because of something her said. There’s only one obvious solution – go along, sit quietly in the corner like an anaesthetised lemon, speak only when spoken to and leave as soon as humanely possible.

Dobbin has so far been of little use, so while Richie is checking his shirt in his tablet’s webcam to see if it looks moderately acceptable, he gently grabs Dob’s tail and put it between his nose and upper lip, so he has a nice bushy fatherly moustache. He puts on his gruff 1950s man voice and scolds his 16-year old female self: “Now young lady, I expect you to behave yourself tonight. Don’t drink too much. Don’t bother anyone. Don’t go off talking to cute boys. Don’t make a damned fool of yourself. Just sit in the corner and look acceptable.” Dobbin pulls his tail back with a soft chirp, and Richie sighs, having run out of procrastinations. He grabs his wallet and keys, and leaves his apartment, muttering to himself under his breath. 

“Get in. Drink little. Speak little. Speak polite. Get out.”

He can feel the eyes of the firing squad on him the whole way there. 

***

When Richie gets to the place half an hour later, he manages to resist the urge to cower outside in the foetal position, and instead pushes the door open to find a surprisingly quaint pub, the walls all lined with books and battered board games. Looking around, he doesn’t see any of the others, even though it’s a good forty minutes after the time Bill texted him, which Richie hoped was late enough for the fashion police. He’s beginning to think this is lamest prank of all time, luring someone to a cider and _Monopoly_ trap, when the bartender takes pity on his helpless ass and asks if he’s looking for someone.

“Um, the Clubhouse Collective are supposed to be here?”

“Oh yeah,” the bartender chuckles ruefully. “Yeah they’re here all right. They’re in the back room.” He nods in the direction of a corridor. “You’ll be able to hear them. Thank God they tip well…”

Richie pushes open the padded door at the end of the corridor and is met with a wave of sound. He just has time to register the room he’s standing in – a colourful space crammed with TVs, consoles, bottles and chairs of every shape and size that immediately triggers the ‘Cool!’ sign in Richie’s brain to switch on in throbbing neon – before he’s distracted by the cry everyone makes by way of greeting. That sound, an enthusiastic screeching roar of inarticulate exclamation, tells Richie that the others are clearly several drinks in already, just as much as the number of empty glasses scattered around does.

Eddie leaps up and scuttles straight for him, holding his hand out before promptly dropping it. “Richie you made it! Not that I didn’t think you could or anything, it’s not hard to find by any means, a monkey could do it, though it would probably need some sort of map-reading training first, or maybe you could just get it to memorise the route like a rat or something, but anyway glad you’re here! We’re all glad that is, not just me or anything. Like the shirt by the way, did your mom buy it for your or something? Look you better catch up, we’ve all had several already, unless you pre-gamed or something?”

The pace of Eddie’s chatter is no different to normal, but the way he’s rocking nervously back and forth slightly is unfamiliar, and while the (entirely accurate) jab about Richie’s outfit meant that he wasn’t exactly being _nice_ by most people’s standards, there was certainly a softness his voice that was almost disarming. Eddie grabbed the nearest drink and pressed it into Richie’s hand before yanking it back alarmed. “Oh shit, you do drink right? Like we’re not peer pressuring you into sin or anything, like some of those PSAs they shoved on you as kids, because you don’t need to have anything if you don’t want, there’s mixers of course , or we could see if they have –“

“No it’s cool!” Richie juts in, alarmed by the panic in Eddie’s eyes. “I drink like a fish who hates his own liver.”

Eddie lets out a strange little garbled huff, like he was going to make a particular sound but then tried to drag it back into his lungs at the last moment. But his shoulders relax at least, and he hovers a hand near to Richie’s lower back and guides him in the direction of a seat and a controller. 

“Okay, that’s great. Awesome timing as well because it’s your turn. You play _PUBG_ right? I don’t normally care for battle royales, but this one isn’t too bad. The player base is just a bit more mature you know, you can play properly with them.”

“You’re just saying that because you got banned from _Fortnite_ for making a 10-year old cry!” Mike cries out from across the room.

“No I didn’t!” Eddie yelps. “Anyway that little camping piece of shit had it coming. Don’t you hate campers? Like how do they have the patience to just sit there all the time, it’s so dull.”

As Richie begins to play he finds himself talking a lot more that he originally planned, and he feels only a little guilty at what his cat-moustached father would say about this. Maybe it’s the fact that Richie is always happy to chat about video games endlessly to himself in his head, and the booze is just making it easier to say everything out loud for a change (the rule that he has to do two fingers for every kill is certainly one way of catching up), but he can’t also help but think there might be some sort of Eddie Effect going on that is causing him to abandon his rules so quickly. Initially he mostly just goes agree with everything Eddie says, which is fine because he too has way to much energy to just sit there and camp rather than run around like a lunatic, but after a little while he can’t help but push back as well. The third time he catches Eddie screen-peeping he calls him out on it, and when he denies it the words “cheating little leprechaun” slip out without notice. Eddie gives him a swift little jab in the ribs in response, and Richie instinctively bumps him back with his shoulder, which cause the shorter man to lose his balance and his character to crash his quad bike. For one quick moment, mortification grabs Richie around the ankles and prepares to drag him down, but then Eddie shouts “You’re dead Tozier!” then thrusts another drink into Richie’s hand, and the tension spills out of him. 

When their time is up, and they pass their controllers over to Stan and Mike, it seems weirdly natural to just sit at one of the tables and carry on talking. When Eddie says that he thinks that _Majora’s Mask_ was better than _Ocarina of Time_ , Richie goes off a wild impassioned defence without thinking about it, and while Eddie certainly lets loose several squawks of protest, he also sits there, bending close across the table to tell Richie he’s a populist hack, rather than walking away angrily the way people have always done before when Richie has told them that they’re wrong and an idiot. Eventually Richie hits upon the debate strategy of interrupting every one of Eddie’s points with a Navi-style ‘Hey! Listen!’ and suddenly it happens again…Eddie giggles. But this time the urge to run away and hide in a broom closet is only fleeting, and instead Richie feels compelled to keep on making that sound happen, like it’s a scab he can’t stop from picking at till it’s oozing giggly blood. 

“Okay everyone!” Mike shouts out, interrupting Richie’s new-found obsession. “It’s time for the toast, so get your asses over here.”

The others all start grumbling and mumbling, but they also seem to be hiding smiles as they hurry to the big table in the centre and take seats. Richie is watching from the side, confused by the sudden shift and hoping the others don’t notice him, before Mike makes eye contact with him and says in a stern voice, “You too Tozier.”

His feet feeling like they’re weighed down and ready to sleep with the fishes, Richie walks slowly to the table and sits down in the last empty chair. He wonders briefly if he perhaps should have worn a nicer shirt to be ritually sacrificed in. 

Mike is pouring everyone new drinks and looking around the table with a deeply serious look on his face, which the others appear to be attempting to match with varying levels of success. The horrible idea that this all perhaps an extremely elaborate setup to prank Richie crosses his mind, and he can’t help but glance up quickly at the ceiling to see if there is a bucket stashed up there.

“As five-sixths of you know,” Mike intones heavily, “the time has come again to share a cup together and remind ourselves of who we truly are. I shall begin.”

He raises his glass and looks directly at Ben. “To Ben, the man who once got so drunk, he forgot he was married, then woke up and freaked out in the middle of the night because he thought he was sharing a bed with the world’s cuddliest home invader.”

Everyone else cheers and laughs, and Ben flushes and grins embarrassedly. “Yeah, well sometimes I can’t believe she actually married me,” he says, which garners a chorus of ‘Aaaaws’ from the others. Bev grabs him in a headlock-hug and kisses him on the cheek. “You are adorable. But you are also such a…LOSER!”

More cheers, everyone raises their glasses, shouts “LOSER!” and takes a large gulp. After Eddie gives him a swift kick under the table, Richie drinks too, as the mystification of the situation begins to ebb away.

Stan takes a stand and raises his glass. “To Bev, the person who insisted that they get to design all the DLC costumes for _The Silver Lady of Death_ by themselves, then freaked out at the deadline and just drew everyone naked, forcing us to push release back by two weeks.”

Richie can’t help but join in with the laughter this time, and even lets out a little cheer before raising his glass and calling out “LOSER!” with everyone else.

“Yeah well, maybe I’d have had more to work with if you hadn’t insisted on programming all the clothing as if they were catsuits!” Bev calls back at Stan, throwing a pretzel his way for good measure. “Now the rest of us know this already, but for the benefit of the newbie,” she nods in Richie’s direction, “let me say this.” She clears her throat and puts on a posh British voice. “To Stan, the man who was so desperate to not come across as a nerd on his first date with Patty, that he lied about being a video game programmer. By claiming to be an accountant instead.”

Cheers, whoops, laughter and a chorus of “LOSER!” echoes forth once more.

Now Ben stands. “To Eddie, the man who found out 14 years ago that they didn’t work, but still demands that we put in an inhaler as a secret cure-all in every game we release.”

“LOSER!”

Eddie grins, gives Ben the finger and then blows him a kiss.

Bill’s turn. “To Mike, the man who has such an obsession with rituals, that even during this ridiculous thing, he tries to hide the fact that he’s sporting a half-chub.”

Mike actually joins in with the “LOSER!” this time, before giving Bill a gentle smack and a smooch.

Richie is enjoying himself immensely, delighted at being able to join in with this fond absurdity. Still, he knows better than to join in too much, which is why he only thinks to himself “To Bill, the man who gets a chub in the office whenever his husband bends over.”

Richie realises that perhaps he’s drunk more than he thought, when he notices the entire table is staring at him slack-jawed. Maybe he didn’t say that in his head after all. He can feel the colour draining from his face and is just bracing himself so he can sprint out of the room when there is a great whoop of hollering as they all burst out laughing, while some shout out “LOSER!” and the rest point accusingly at Bill. 

Bev shout-asks Richie “What, really! I’ve never seen that?!”

Richie’s brain is screaming at him to just say shrug and say nothing, but there’s something about this audience of eager faces (and one embarrassed face) looking at him that just drag the words right out of him. “Um, yeah. You guys never noticed that time when Mike came back from his lunch break at the gym, and he was still damp from the shower, and then he ate that banana, and Bill spent the next 20 minutes awkwardly walking around holding a tablet in front of himself?”

There’s actual applause at this, and Richie’s heart jitters and his mouth curls up into a grin without him meaning it to. Bill pulls his face out of his hands and points a finger accusingly. “To Richie, the new kid who spies on his colleague’s genitals!”

“LOSER!”

Richie has been called that many times before, from school to Twitter and everywhere in between. But never before has that word made him feel quite like this, never has it made him smile like this, never has it caused a wave of warm magma to wash over him like this. He finds himself glancing over at Eddie sitting next to him and their gazes lock. 

Eddie inclines his head and raises his glass. “Welcome to the Loser’s Club” he says soft enough that only Richie can hear it. Then he downs the rest if his drink and smirks at him. “Asshole.”

*

The rest of the night turns into a blurry montage of games, booze and more serotonin than Richie has felt in years. A lot of what happens gets lost forever down the drain of joyful group inebriation, but a few memories do manage to survive to the next day.

At one point he finds himself with Eddie, checking out the shelves of nerd memorabilia that line one wall. Eddie begins playing with some original _Final Fantasy VII_ action figures, and Richie’s fingers twitch with the urge to join in. In between making little ‘pew pew’ and ‘schwipp schwipp’ noises, Eddie asks him conversationally, “So, when you were a kid who did you think was hotter? Tifa or Aerith?” Richie doesn’t even think before answering, “Neither. I was just happy to end up going on the date with Barret. Didn’t work out why until I was older.”

Eddie turns and gives Bev a quick thumbs-up at that point, before picking Cloud back up and bashing him against Sephiroth. Richie figures it must be because Bev is a big Barret fan, which makes sense considering Ben’s height. Then again, Ben is really more of a Red XIII now that he thinks about it, being all soulful and wise and everything. Richie half considers shouting across the room to ask Bev if Ben has a tail, before thinking better of it.

*

Later he, Bill and Mike are all wailing away on the karaoke machine. Actually, Bill and Mike are doing a surprisingly good job on the harmonies in _Super Trooper_. Richie is relegated to just doing the ‘supah-pah-pah troop-pah-pah’ parts, but he’s happy. Bill and Mike both have an arm around him, and he feels like he’s wrapped in a feather boa of delight.

*

He’s sitting on the couch with Eddie again, playing some old-skool _Timesplitters_. The drink has completely taken away the PG-13 censorship from Eddie’s smack talk, and it’s not long before Eddie is telling that he “deserves a good minigunning” for “choosing the monkey like a punk-ass little bitch”. With 5 seconds left on the timer, Eddie manages to gain the lead by blowing Richie’s head off with the Tactical 12-Gauge, but Richie hammers the button quick enough so he can respawn and blow Eddie up with the remote limpet mine he stuck to him before he died. Half a second later the game ends in a draw. The look of mixed exasperation and admiration on Eddie’s face is something Richie is determined to commit to memory even through his drunken haze. Eddie immediately challenges him to a rematch, even though he’d presumably been planning on adding two more players for the next match, judging by how closely he’s sitting to Richie on the enormous couch.

*

Princess Peach (Richie), Luigi (Ben) and Pikachu (Bev) are all caught in a particularly even-matched round of _Smash Bros_ , none of them able to force the others out. After several minutes of brutal stalemate, Bev exclaims “There’s no way I’m going to lose to the new kid! Ben honey, what do you say we team up?”. Shortly thereafter Peach is caught in a massive thunder blast and Luigi punts her right off the screen. Pikachu then immediately turns on Luigi and throws him to his doom before he can react, and Bev cackles manically while Ben looks at her like she hung the moon.

*

At some point snacks have appeared magically from nowhere and Richie is busy munching through a bowl of chips while engaged in a deep but mostly nonsensical conversation with Bill around his idea for a show about a boy and his crime-solving bicycle. As he’s trying to tell Bill just how good he thinks the idea is, he feels something bounce off his chin. He looks around and sees Eddie on the next table, throwing M+Ms at him. So he shoots Eddie a grin and opens his mouth as wild as possible to make his job easier, while continuing to nod along to Bill explains why he wants Alison Janney to be the voice of the bike.

*

Everyone is playing or spectating an extremely tense game of _Mario Party_. The lead switches several times, and everyone is poisoning one another constantly. On the very last turn, Monty Mole steals several stars and claims the crown. Stan just sits there, smiling smugly to himself and utterly unbothered by the howls of outrage all around him.

*

Eventually the poor barman has to close, and he kicks them all out. They spill out onto the pavement, still chattering and singing incessantly. Richie feels giddily weightless, like he’s floating on a tidal wave. The others begin to say their goodbyes, as the couples form up to begin making their leave, but then dart back for one more hug. Eddie sidles up to Richie and throws an arm around his shoulder (standing on his tip-toes to do so). “So, you have fun tonight newbie?” he asks.

“Yeah man,” Richie grins. “For a bunch of losers, you guys are pretty cool.”

“You know a lot about what’s cool?” Eddie asks, the sarcasm not stinging.

“Cool is my middle name.”

“Is it now?”

“No, it’s Wentworth.”

Eddie bursts out laughing. “That’s the least cool middle name ever!”

Their shared hysterics are interrupted when Ben and Bev shout that they’re leaving. After calling back, Eddie glances sideways at Richie. Then at the floor. Then at Bev and Ben climbing into the Uber. Then at Richie. “So…do you want to crash at mine?”

Richie blinks. “Um, don’t you live on the other side of town?”

“Well, yeah. But you know Uber’s a thing right?”

Another blink. “Yeah, but I literally live a twenty minute walk away. Thanks for the offer though, that’s really nice of you dude.” 

Eddie glances back down at his shoes and Richie blurts out, “You could totally crash at mine if you need to, but the couch is…well actually it probably is about your size. But if you sleep on it, my cat would literally murder you in the night for taking his spot. Sorry.”

“No, that’s good,” Eddie says in a stilted voice. After a moment he smiles. “Glad I managed to escape your cat murder den.” 

Eddie turns to face Richie directly and goes to raise both his arms up before dropping them back to his side. Then he curls one hand into a fist and holds it out. Richie bumps it.

“Goodnight Loser.”

Twenty minutes later, Richie slips back into his flat, trying to be quiet. Nevertheless, Dobbin is sitting there on the couch, staring disapprovingly at him and tapping one paw. Undaunted, Richie picks him up and cuddles him close. Dobbin stays grumpily stiff for a few seconds, before softening and nuzzling his face into Richie’s armpit. Richie stays like that for a while, breathing deeply and happily, before Dobbin eventually pulls back and wiggles out of his arms.

Richie lets him go, pours himself several glasses of water, writes himself a post-it note saying CALL MOM. TELL HER YOU HAD THE BEST NIGHT EVER, takes off his glasses and then flops down face-forward onto his unmade bed. He hums happily to himself and falls into a floppy sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, a (mostly) happy chapter! Will it remain like that, or will there be more sad boi angst?  
> We shall see.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone for reading, and even more so to those who kudos and EVEN MORE so to those who comment!


	6. Dialogue trees

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie begins to hang out with the Losers outside of work and maybe makes friends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter took so long to come out! As compensation, it's extra long.

Richie awakes with a jolt. Something is poking his forehead. Without his glasses it takes him a moment to focus his blurry eyes enough to realise what it is – Dobbin’s paw, batting him in the face. He lets out a low groan of protest, and pries his dry and sticky lips open. “Ugh. I’m alive Dobbin. It’s fine. Go back to sleep.”

Apparently satisfied, Dobbin walks up onto Richie’s back, kneads it briefly before curling up and settling down. The soft ball of warmth between his shoulder blades is both annoying and comforting, and Richie isn’t sure he has the energy to do anything about it anyway, so he just buries his face back into the pillow and closes his eyes. He is VERY hungover right now, which normally is something he’s no stranger to, but something feels different about this particular hangover. It’s almost like he’s earned it somehow, like his pain is some war wound he’s proudly showing off. Drifting in and out of the hazy consciousness of his purple heart hangover, he tries to piece together the fragments of last night into some sort of meaningful jigsaw, but the problem is that the picture on the box just doesn’t make any sense. The images of him singing karaoke, him sitting with his arm around Eddie’s shoulders, calling his colleagues losers right to their faces…those things can’t have happened. Not possible. But there are just so many of these memories popping up, all of them bizarrely consistent with one another, surely some of them at least must have been true. His heart throbs warmly at the idea, matching the heat source currently sat on his back and he smiles sleepily.

Eventually though, he decides he really must do something about the pounding in his skull, so he gently nudges Dobbin off and sits up, his back cracking satisfyingly at the stretch. He rubs his face and pulls on his glasses, and the first thing he spots is the post-it note telling him to call Maggie, and he’s very glad that he didn’t drunk-dial her the night before. However, just as he sets off on his quest for water and painkillers, he’s interrupted by the sound of an incoming Skype call. The words ‘Mags and Went, dentists extraordinaire’ hover on his laptop screen, and with a tired groan, Richie changes direction and plops down on the chair in front of it. 

He quickly flattens down his hair and hopes he doesn’t look too much like a person who just got out of bed at one o’clock in the afternoon. He clears this throat, hits the answer icon and says in the cheeriest voice he can muster “Hi Mags!”

His mother’s smirking face appears. “So, how was last night then?” she asks.

Somewhat confused by the abrupt question, Richie answers slowly “Um, fine. Just got a little work done, watched a film, went to bed. Why?”

“Check your messages hon.”

Richie looks around for his phone for a few moments, before spotting where he dumped it the night before. He unlocks it and is immediately confronted with the photos he apparently spammed his mother with in the early hours of the morning. He scrolls through images of Eddie singing into a microphone, a screenshot of their respective kills in _Timesplitters_ scores with the caption ‘Your winner’ and one of the shot glass mountain that they’d built before he gives up and groans in embarrassment. “Er, sorry about that that. I guess I might have had a lot to drink to last night.”

“Oh don’t worry about that. Once your father managed to work out how to turn the thing onto silent we managed to get back to sleep again soon enough.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine, I’m just glad you had fun. So, tell me all about it.”

“I don’t exactly remember _all_ of it. Alcohol does that you know.”

“Yes dear, we were your age once,” Maggie sighs. “Neither of us still has any memory whatsoever of the night you were conceived actually.”

Richie buries his face in his hands. “Didn’t need to know that Mom.”

“Well a little extra knowledge never hurt anyone. So tell me – who was that one who always had his shirt off in all the photos?

“That would be Bill.”

“Oh, so that’s Bill! That must mean the gentleman who was eating his face was Mike?”

Richie nods and Maggie claps her hands together delightedly.

“So sweet. Tell them I said hi next time you see them.”

Richie agrees, knowing perfectly well he’s not going to do any such thing. After a slight pause, Maggie glances away for a moment before looking back and asking hesitantly, “But you did have fun right?”

Richie thinks for a moment on how to answer, but he can’t help the telling grin that slides onto his face. “Yeah Mom. I did.”

Her face lights up immediately. “That’s great! Tell me! I want that tea. That’s how you say it right?”

“Well it was drinking mostly. Mike organised this whole game around it, which was just insane. And then me and Eddie played this actual game, where I totally pwned him even though I haven’t played in years. So he then challenged me to a handstand contest I think it was, which naturally he won, because he has these really strong arms. I’ve never properly noticed before, but for such a little guy he’s really strong I think, because at one point he picked me up and threw me onto this beanbag, I can’t remember why, but it was like super impressive, oh and then he…” Richie is aware he sounds childish gushing on like this, but he can’t help it. He got to play with the cool kids last night and he wants the whole world to know. He probably would have yammered on for an hour or so, but after a few minutes he’s interrupted by Went’s voice calling from off screen “We need to leave in five minutes!”

“Yes, yes I know dear, I’ll just be another minute” Maggie shouts back. 

“Sorry, I forgot it’s your appointment this afternoon,” Richie admits guiltily. “Don’t let me keep you.”

Maggies waves a hand dismissively, and then looks directly into Richie’s eyes and smiles knowingly. “So. Eddie, huh?”

“Yeah, I’ve told you about him, he’s the one I work in the same room as.”

“Oh you’ve told us about him. You like him?”

“Of course. He’s brilliant. Some of the insights he has are outstanding. The way he solves these conceptual problems, like he has just this ability to dive down deep into something and pluck…”

“I’m sure his ‘insight’ is enormous” Maggie says, interrupting his rambling and doing little bunny ears around the word ‘insight’.

Richie blinks confusedly. “Yeah. It is.”

Maggie just continues to stare piercingly at him. Richie squirms uncomfortably.

Eventually she sighs. “Well, it’s good to see you had a fun night. I have to run. Let us know how things go with Eddie.”

Richie nods, though he hasn’t the foggiest what ‘things’ she’s referring to. “Hope your appointment is okay.”

“Same old, same old I’m sure. Love you.”

“Love you too,” Richie responds and he signs off with a wave. 

The hangover fades, but Richie’s good mood lasts the rest of the weekend. He feels proud of what he did on Friday, and finds himself randomly remembering parts of it, which causes him to break out in giggles. Even Dobbin eventually forgives him for coming home late. By the time Monday rolls around Richie is feeling much more confident than he normally does. None of the expected Voices made any appearances, and while he’s not so foolish to assume any such night like that is ever going to happen again, he’s happy to dwell on the memories of it. Neither is he going to make a big deal of it at work or anything, knowing perfectly well to keep his head down and get on with it, and then occasionally smile quietly to himself when no-one is looking and think about the time he go to hang with the coolest losers on Earth.

His bus was delayed and he’s running a little late when he slips into the weekly meeting with the rest of the leadership team, planning to just mumble out a hasty apology for his tardiness and slip quietly into his usual seat. But as soon as he opens the door he’s met with a cacophony of whoops and applause that he walks into and ricochets off like it’s a brick wall. “Here he is everyone, the man of the hour!” Bill calls out, miming a microphone and waving his arms around. “The party master himself, Richie ‘Shots’ Tozier!”

“My new karaoke hero!” Mike cries, raising an imaginary glass in his honour.

“LEG – END! LEG – END! LEG -END!” Bev and Ben intone in an alternating chant and they bang the table rhythmically. Even Stan inclines his head graciously and tells him that “he’s a pretty cool dude, even if your _Mario Party_ strategy sucks.”

Richie stands there, pressed up against the door with frozen legs and a flushed face. He wants to dive right into this attention and roll around in the praise, like he’s Scrooge McDuck springboarding into his approval room. Or at the very least take a little bow, and tell Stan that he’s a bullshitter, there is no such thing as strategy in _Mario Party_ and anyway he’s not going to take that from a cheating little mole. But he doesn’t do any of those things. He can’t. Because the applause isn’t stopping. Not even after all the Losers settle down and Richie walks awkwardly over and sits down at the conference table, the sounds just do not stop. He can hear the exact same clapping and comments and cheers and jeers as that party he went to in his first week as a freshman in college and had tequilaed his way up onto a table and danced like a madman for the crowd who all stood around and hooted noise as he did so. He heard those exact same sounds the day after when he’d seen the video entitled ‘Drunk Doofus Dances’, but somehow those identical noises sounded different this time. From the corner of the room he can see the audience from that show in elementary school when he’d tried out his magic tricks for the first ever time and that gang of older kids who’d always treated him like shit had stood up and stuck their fingers in their mouths and whistled and Richie had grinned in delight and confusion. Then the leader of the group had shouted out he was the ‘suckiest musician ever’ and every other kid there had whistled along in perfect imitation.

So Richie just mumbles the word ‘Thanks’ several time and avoids making eye contact with anyone. He wants to wave graciously, but he can’t because he’s too busy clutching the arms of his chair so hard his knuckles have turned white. He wants to contribute to the meeting, to show everyone that he’s still a good worker no matter what they saw him do, but he can’t because he’s too busy staring at his blank notebook to think of any words to say. He wants to listen to everything they have to say, but he can’t hear anything over the clapping. 

By the end of the meeting Richie doesn’t think he’s registered a single word that’s been said, but noticing the movement all around him he stands up and numbly walks back to his and Eddie’s office. When he gets there though he just stands still, hovering on autopilot and brain whirring while it tries to think what it is he’s supposed to be doing right now. The skin on the back of his neck prickles and he sense more than he sees Eddie looking at him from across the room. Eventually out of the corner his eye he can see a pale blob appear, and he turns to look at it. It is Eddie’s fist. He looks up at the fist’s face. The fist’s face says “Hey, just wanted to say, it was really fun getting to see that side of you on Friday.”

Richie looks back down at the fist’s fist. There is no sound for a moment, then a hesitant voice asking “Are you…are you okay…dude?”

Richie turns around and walks to the bathroom. Mercifully, it seems to be empty as he stands at a sink and stares unseeing into the mirror, his eyes stinging, his breaths getting louder and shorter, and his thoughts hurricaning inside of his head. Nothing is making sense right now, nothing fits. The way he remembers everyone being on Friday and the haziness of the memories; the applause just now and the applause he is used to; Eddie’s arm around his shoulders and his offer of a bro bump – he doesn’t understand what it all means, how all these things can have happened when they don’t fit together, why the world is jamming all these different parts into him right now and somehow expecting it all to make sense and for all these reactive agents to stay inert and not boil him from the inside. His muddled brain cannot comprehend it and it feels like it’s struggling blind through a swamp. His breathing is threatening to turn into sobbing when he hears the door creak open and spots a streak of red in the mirror. He gulps heavily and blinks furiously, turning around to see Beverly Marsh standing there in the men’s room. 

Mind flailing wildly and unsuccessfully for a joke, he straightens up and pretends to be fixing his hair, something he hasn’t actually done for real since the QuiffgateTM incident of 2006. Bev doesn’t say anything at all, just hoists her herself up and sits on the countertop, swinging her legs casually. After a moment, Richie notices that she’s holding out a box of white sticks to him. He hasn’t smoked in years, but there is something very alluring about the idea right now. “Thought we weren’t supposed to smoke in here?” he asks, mostly to push away the temptation and because he couldn’t stand the uncomfortable silence much longer.

“We’re not. These are candy sticks” Bev replies, rattling the box. 

“Oh. Thank you.” He takes one and sucks on it. 

Bev hold it like a cigarette, taps the imaginary ash into the sink, put it back in her mouth. The way you do. Richie does the same. He can feel her watching him, as she swings her legs and smokes her candy. He wants to turn his head and stare back and then dive down the plughole. 

“You’re not having a very good day, are you new kid?” she asks.

His lips twitch in the opening spasms of a smile, but he doesn’t let his mouth go any further. He shrugs and mumbles “It’s fine.”

Bev hums in acknowledgment. Swings and smokes. It feels like she’s building up to something, and it makes Richie want to scuttle away.

“You know,” she says in a gentler voice than he’s ever heard her use before, “if, and I’m not saying you did, but if you thought we were making fun of you back there…we weren’t. We don’t want to do that.”

Richie doesn’t know what to think. Of course they were making fun of him. Except maybe they weren’t. But it only makes sense for them to do so, but if that’s the case then why doesn’t it feel like that? None of this fits his past patterns, he’s a crime scene investigator tied up hopelessly in yellow tape and trying to play pin the tail on the murderer but forgot what a tail is. He shrugs and mumbles “It’s fine” again.

“Well, if that is what you thought, that’s not fine. Because we really did have fun with you on Friday. We meant every word.”

“Really?” Shame creeps over Richie, but he can’t keep the helplessness from his voice. 

“Yeah. Stan even said, and I quote, ‘you weren’t terrible’.”

A damp laugh coughs it way out of Richie’s mouth and he almost chokes on his candy stick.

“Look, I know we probably seem a bit weird and imposing,” Bev continues. “And if that’s not your scene then that’s fine. But if you do want to hang out again, we’d all be happy with that. Even sober.”

Richie glances at her in the mirror and for half a second they make eye contact. Richie sees something unfamiliar in her eyes before he looks away.

“It’s _Age of Empires_ Monday tonight at mine and Ben’s place. Again, no pressure, but if you want to join us then…consider yourself formally invited. If you’d like that.” She slowly lifts her hand up and places it gently on his shoulder. When he doesn’t react she gives it the slightest squeeze and Richie feels himself soften, and for a moment, just for a moment, he finds himself leaning in towards her, his head beginning to drop down in the direction of her shoulder. Then his brain spikes, and he stiffens and snaps back upright. Bev takes her hand off, but it hovers in the air for a second before she jumps down off the counter and begins to walk out of the bathroom.

Then she turns around, walks back, grabs Richie’s hand and presses the box of candy sticks into it. “Don’t eat them all at once kiddo.”

“Pretty sure I’m older than you” Richie mumbles around his smile.

“Then don’t eat them all at once old man.”

Richie looks over at her she begins to walk out again. “Yeah whatever you whippersnapper” he says to her retreating back. “Get back to your Tik-Grams and your Tweet-Toks.”

She leaves him alone in the bathroom with the sound of her laughter. He looks at himself in the mirror and feels limp.

*

Once the workday has ended, and Richie is standing outside the address that Bev messaged him, Richie feels like he’s been placed in a clothing bag and had all the thoughts and feelings vacuumed out of him. The weakness in his knees suggests that this should feel like some sort of historic occasion, the first time he’s been around someone else’s house since he made Sally Mueller cry at her ninth birthday party. But he doesn’t. There’s no elation at being included, no fear of what might happen, not even a simple glee at the chance to play some _Age of Empires II_. The confusion has boiled up and evaporated away. He can’t even be bothered to summon any voices to give their opinion on the situation. All he does feel is some sort of compulsion tugging him to ring the doorbell and spend time with the Losers, no matter what they do or how they treat him.

Barely seven seconds after he presses the button, Ben opens the door. He’s wearing a button-up shirt and has a tea towel draped over his arm. “Hi Richie! Come on in,” he says cheerily, ushering Richie inside. He leads him swiftly through a cluttered corridor, up an equally messy staircase with little piles of books stacked on each riser, before they emerge in a light and spacious dining room, illuminated by tasteful recessed lighting and the skylight soaring overhead. The others are all gathered around a large table, laptops in front of them and an enormous buffet of snacks laid in the centre.

Ben pulls out a seat for Richie and waits for him to pull his laptop out of his bag, bouncing on the balls of his feet slightly, before asking Richie “Would you like any canapes? Sesame toast? Viennese whirl? Maybe a crab puff?” Richie eyes the smorgasbord warily – is this really what people did when inviting people round to hang out? He had been expecting a bag of pretzels and a bowl of M+Ms at most. Maybe they were finally getting around to sacrificing him after all and wanted to fatten him up before devouring him in honour of the Daedric Princes. “Don’t worry Richie, just help yourself to whatever you want,” Mike says with a smile. “Ben just has an addiction to hosting.”

“I do not! I just think it’s polite,” Ben responds sheepishly.

“Please,” Bill says. “You once told us during Truth or Dare that your lifelong ambition was to appear on _Come Dine with Me_. 

“Yes, well. Can I get you a beer Richie?”

“Just water. Thanks.”

By the time Richie has booted up and loaded the game, Ben has reappeared with his water on a little black tray (plus a tasteful gold napkin, a twist of lime and a curly straw), and Bev is explaining the rules. “Okay you’ve played _AOE 2_ before right?” Richie nods. “Well, there’s no rushing here or anything. Everyone is allies and we all trade peacefully until we’ve hit the Imperial Age and built everything up. Then when we’re all ready the warfare starts and all bets are off. Alliances are a good idea, but beware – you will be betrayed. Isn’t that right Stan?”

Stan gives her the finger.

“Okay then, let’s get going.”

So the game starts and it is at once both familiar and quite unrecognisable. Everything that is happening on screen is pretty routine, but being surrounded by conversation as it happens is something new for Richie. A lot of the talk is about the game, discussions of trade routes and recounting past matches, but the rest if about just anything and everything that comes to the Losers’ minds. Richie is very deliberate in how much he says, the need to appear natural and relaxed after his morning meltdown being at the forefront of his thoughts. When they mention a Netflix show he’s seen, he voices his opinion about it and gets into an animated discussion about the merits of one episode with Bill. When they move onto to something he’s never heard of, he shuts up. It feels somewhat like he’s more engaging in anthropological research than an actual conversation, but he likes it nevertheless. Despite the fact that he’s never really done this before, sitting and chatting feels…comforting, like a familiar treat. He’s not sure how to make sense of that. 

After an hour everyone has got everything they want set up, and Bev asks if they’re all ready to fight. Seeing the others nodding, Richie bobs his head as well and switches his diplomatic stance. The atmosphere in the room changes in an instant. Everyone hunches over their laptop a little closer, their eyes darting from one person to the other like they’re engaged in some sort of seven-way Mexican stand-off. Richie nervously moves his troops around and waits anxiously for someone to make the first move. Suddenly the attack horns blare, and an enormous column of war elephants begins marching into his territory.

“That’s right new kid!” Bill says. “You might have done this before, but you’re playing with the big boys now, and you are going to get owned. What are you going to do against Persian war elephants? Their HP, their attack - they are going to crush you. I am in your base, killing your dudes little man.” Richie says nothing and lets Bill crow, while quickly moving his halberdiers into position. “Unless you have a whole lot of massed halberdiers,” Bill continues, “you are going down….oh.” Richie’s men surround the behemoths and swiftly poke them all to death with their pointy sticks. Taking the opportunity to counter-attack while he can, he marches his army across the map to Bill’s base. While his battering rams get to work on the gates, he does a quick castle drop just outside the walls, so as soon as the gate falls he is ready to just _flood_ Bill’s city with Malay karambit warriors. Strangely though, he is confronted by virtually no defenders and starts torching the place practically unopposed. He looks up to see Bill squirming uncomfortably in his seat.

“Dude, did you spend ALL of your resources on elephants?” Richie asks.

“Um…yeah. Thought I might be able to over-power you.”

“Ah. Maybe you shouldn’t try that against a big boy should you ‘Big Bill’?”

Bill gives him the finger. Richie gives it right back. Bill smiles and watches his last man die.

Richie is feeling pretty pleased with himself, till Ben douses that with a bucket of freezing fear. “Okay, you got some beginner’s luck there. But you haven’t got a chance against what I’m bringing.” Richie looks back at the map to see that he’s not bluffing – the great mass of Byzantine cataphracts currently heading towards him will make absolute mincemeat of his infantry hanging about exposed in the burnt-out shell of Bill’s base. “Not to mention,” Ben continues, “I’ve got Eddie backing me up and ready to lay siege to your city. Isn’t that right Eddie?” 

Ben pauses. “Er, Eddie, that isn’t really a good place to position your army. Wait, those are my walls you’re tearing down. You see that’s actually my city you’re torching with your Viking berserkers…goddamit.”

With a heavy sigh and large eye-roll, Ben turns his cavalry around and begins to run back to his base in the desperate hope of salvaging the situation. Richie takes the opportunity and beats a hasty retreat back to his own city. He tries to shoot a look of gratitude to Eddie for accidentally saving his skin, but Eddie looks to be too absorbed in burning Ben’s town centre and doesn’t make eye contact. 

Just as Ben’s army is about to get back however, they are met from nowhere with a cloud of arrows that appear from a nearby cliff and brutally decimates their ranks. Ben actually squeaks in protest and looks around the table for the culprit. “That’s right Benny,” Mike chuckles. “You should have mixed some knights in there rather than rely only on the cataphracts. Their lack of pierce armour makes them helpless again the Chinese chu ko nu’s rapid fire, especially once you factor in the 25% damage bonus for firing from a cliff.”

“Yeah well, my boys will tell your archers apart,” Eddie says threateningly, “and I noticed you’ve left a gap open between these woods that means I can totally…wait. Are those…are you actually using scorpions?”

Mike smiles smugly. “Yep. And your infantry will get torn apart by their ballista bolts, because my rocketry tech gives them +4 attack, and you’ve forgotten to use staggered formation _again_ so maybe you should just take your schooling and learn something from it.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” Eddie grumbles darkly, while ordering his bloody and battered army into retreat and Mike turns to finish off Ben’s forces.

“It literally tells you all of it in the tech tree. You see what the rest of you need to understand is that…”

“Well Mike,” Stan interjects, speaking for the first time since hostilities started. “Is that you can memorise and pontificate about all the stats you want. But it won’t do you a damn bit of good if you don’t notice that I’ve been smashing your castles to pieces with my trebuchets for the past five minutes.”

“Wait what?” Mike squawks. “But how….?”

“Villagers.”

“You…you got lumberjacks to chop their way through the wood into my base? You sneaky little…genius.”

“I know. And yeah you can try and fight back, but my British longbowman are safe and snug now behind _your_ walls and as you can see – they outrange everything you have. So school yourself next time, you big nerd.”

Bill laughs as Mike’s last man dies, and toasts his beer in Stan’s direction. Mike throws a spinach canape at Bill, but he catches it in his mouth, so Mike apparently decides to fish it out of his mouth with his tongue, and at this point Richie realises he should probably stop watching them and focus on the game.

A message from Bev has just popped up on his screen. _Stan is the most dangerous opponent. I suggest the three of us team up to take him down_. Richie considers this for a moment, before sending a message to Eddie _Do you still have an army?_. The reply comes back quickly - _Of course. That’s why I use berserkers. No matter how much of a bruising they take, I always bounce back. Why?_

_You wanna defeat Stan? Together?_

The reply seems to take a long time to appear. Richie fiddles nervously before a simple _Yes_ eventually pops up.

They don’t message again after that, they don’t need to. Eddie and Richie work together remarkably well, commanding their forces in perfect unspoken sync. While Eddie’s trebuchets knock down Stan’s towers, Richie’s battering rams smash down the gates, their armoured shells practically immune to the longbow’s arrows. Once they’ve broken through Eddie’s berserkers take the brunt of the fire in a direct charge, while Richie’s fast-moving karambits flank the archers and together they dispatch Stan brutally and efficiently. He doesn’t even seem bothered by it, just leans back in his chair and watches the pair of them knock him out of the game.

Not five seconds after their victory, another message from Bev appears. _Remember, Eddie will attack you while you’re not looking. We better do it first. My army is about to sneak attack his base if you distract him in the field._ Richie isn’t sure about this. He looks up at Eddie to try and gauge his intent, but once again Eddie isn’t making eye contact. After a few moments of hesitation, Richie decides to follow the suggestion and attacks Eddie’s siege weapons before he can react.

“Oh, you are so dead Tozier!” Eddie shouts from behind his screen and the rest of the table laughs. 

Before long, their battle has turned into a brutal slug fest. One will gain a great victory, only to be met next with a crushing defeat. Thousands die and the smack talk flies thick and fast. The defeated players gather around either side – Ben and Mike with Richie, Bill and Stan with Eddie – hovering behind their chairs, cheering them on and shouting out wildly contradictory suggestions. Eventually both sides have run out of gold, and their exhausted armies are running on empty. Eddie seems unable to comprehend how he’s being defeated.

“I threw everything I had at you in that last attack! How the fuck do you still have swordsman??” he screams, watching his empire get torn apart.

“That’s why I always pick Malay,” Richie smirks. “Cheap militia units till the end baby.”

As his last building crumbles Eddie looks up at Richie directly for the first time since the game began. “I can’t believe I lost to trash units” he grumbles. He’s pouting, but the corners of his mouth are twitching upwards. Richie’s insides squirm with twin feelings of guilt and glee and he wants to jump up on the table and dance in victory and also fall to his knees and beg Eddie’s forgiveness.

And then Bev’s Saracen mamelukes charge into his base and slaughter him in less than a minute.

Once the cries of admiration and howls of outrage have subsided, everyone agrees to a rematch. And then another one after that. Before Richie notices, it’s one o’clock in the morning and everyone is looking tired but satisfied. “Wait, isn’t it a school night? Do you normally play this late?” he asks.

Eddie looks down at the floor. “Yeah, well” he says awkwardly. “Why else you do think Stan is always falling asleep in meetings?”

“Your presentations always make me sleepy” Stan retorts.

“I just assumed that Patty was wearing you out the night before” Richie says and the resultant laughter from everyone (including Stan) make him wiggle happily in his seat.

Later, as he’s sitting exhausted on the last bus home, but far too excited to feel sleepy, he keeps breaking out in giggles to himself thinking about the evening, eliciting strange looks from the lady next to him. It takes all his effort to not lift up his shoe to see if a titanic child has written the word ‘ANDY’ there. 

*

Richie wakes up the next morning to a baffling number of notifications on his phone. It takes him a moment to realise what’s happened – Bill has added to him to the group chat. The group chat. Richie has wanted to be part of a group chat since he was a kid. He falls back onto the bed, clutches his phone to his chest and kicks his legs into the air, giggling to himself while Dobbin rolls his eyes at him. He has to breath heavily to calm himself down, he feels like a pyromaniac with a flamethrower. He doesn’t want to go overboard with spamming the chat with all the cool lines he’s thought up over the past few months and annoy everyone, he has to be measured about this. For one thing, there’s an enormous quantity of in-jokes already appearing in the chat, and he spends several minutes just copying the key ones into a folder called ‘Losers Lore’ so he can try and decipher them later. Over the next few days he mostly finds himself playing it safe and just posting memes as and when the situation calls for it – luckily he has a vast collection of them in his ‘Memes for every occasion’ folder, all tagged so he can easily find one that would work with the setup.

Possibly his favourite thing about it though is how they have one conversation going on in the work group chat and at the same time another one in the fun group chat, and just switch from one to the other seamlessly.

**Stan: _Okay, I’m thinking about increasing the rag doll level by about 15% if that’s okay with everyone_**

**Ben: _Okay with me, but it will probably mean I have to take out a few destructible surfaces, otherwise that will neutralise the increased rag doll_**

**Ben:** _I did it everyone! I finally told that barista he’s been getting the order wrong_

**Bev:** _How long have you been wanting to do that?_

**Ben:** _Like a month_

**Richie:** _Wait give me a sec and I’ll find that meme of Spongebob with his hands on his knees looking exhausted_

**Richie: _If we’re going to increase the rag doll we’ll need to have a conversation about lighting_**

**Stan:** _Seriously Ben, how do you not just tell the guy the order is incorrect. Just be direct._

**Richie:** _Stan is so dO yOu CaLl ThIs A vAnIlLa LaTtE???_

**Mike:** _No this is Patrick_

**Eddie: _Richie’s right, if the lighting is too bright it can turn heavy rag doll from creepy to comical_**

**Eddie:** _I can’t believe what children you people all are_

**Richie:** _And you’re not? Height wise I assumed you were_

**Eddie:** _Fuck you I’m average adult height_

**Bill:** _If you’re an adult, why are you in a group chat with a bunch of children?_

**Richie:** _Shit, Bill’s right we should report Eddie_

**Eddie:** _I hate you all_

**Eddie: _I’ll schedule the lighting meeting_**

And so on and so on, day after day, and Richie loves every moment of it.

The twin chats rather sets out the dynamic for how Richie plans to run his life with the Losers now – he jokes around with them remotely, and then comes to work and acts all professional. It seems like a solid plan and the council of Voices endorsed it. But then the others keep on poking holes in the strategy by doing things with him outside of work in the real world. _AOE_ Mondays keep happening. On Friday he and Mike are chatting about graphic novels over lunch, and when Mike starts gushing about a particular series, Richie says that he’s never read any of it, which causes the other man to make a series of outraged squawking sounds and then demand that Richie accompany him tomorrow so he can get caught up and Richie just…agrees to it. Doesn’t even think about it, just says yes. On Saturday morning he doesn’t let Dob speak, doesn’t let him voice his disapproval or issue stern warnings on what will happen if Richie is too Richie. He just puts some food down for him and scritches his belly and walks out of his flat. He spends the rest of the day tramping after Mike from one obscure bookshop to another (he doesn’t need to ask why they don’t just order them online, because apparently this is ‘part of the process’ according to Mike), being introduced to multiple different series and authors and having the importance of their thematic artwork and writing lectured to him. Mike even sets him homework, which ones he needs to read and report back on what he thought in a fortnight. It’s the most enjoyable time Richie has ever had shopping in his life. Or maybe there’s just something about being ordered about by a muscular man that he likes.

The digital/meatspace divide remains rather firmer with Eddie. Things between them feel a little different now, as if something changed after that night out. They still work well together, but it’s somewhat more professional perhaps, as if Eddie has turned his volume down a couple of notches. There’s a couple of times that Richie spots him opening his mouth to say something, only to hang for a second and close it again – it’s a behaviour Richie is personally very familiar with. But in the group chat he is absolutely does not hold back, and is almost always the first to respond to Richie’s most ridiculous messages. Not that Richie can entirely be blamed for this, after all there’s something addictive about posting something stupid, preferably gross, and watching Eddie’s response inevitably appear like clockwork 10 seconds later. It’s like someone handing him some bubble wrap, of course he’s going to pop it, he has to.

Eventually their bickering gets so incessant that the others demand that they form their own private thread to do this in, and soon enough Richie is spending a large proportion of his day on the _Winding up Eds_ chat. If he goes without it too long, his fingers start twitching and the urge to provoke a reaction begins thudding in the back of his head. They might be sitting in a meeting that’s dragging on far longer than it should do, and he can spot Eddie’s irritation growing from across the table. So he’ll surreptitiously unlock his phone and send Eddie a message asking him to rate the sexual prowess of a random video game character.

**Richie:** _Hey_

**Richie:** _Eds_

**Richie:** _Hey_

**Richie:** _Don’t you think Kirby would give really great head?_

He can see the screen on Eddie’s phone light up and him glance down at it. His mouth twitches. He looks back up at Ben who’s been speaking for 5 minutes now but whose point has yet to emerge. Looks at his phone. Sits up in his chair and looks back at Ben like he’s interested in what he’s saying about the merits of push doors as opposed to pull doors. Keeps looking at Ben while picking up his phone and unlocking it. Looks down at it and types furiously and then puts it face down onto the desk. Turns it face up.

**Eddie:** _What the fuck are you talking about, Kirby basically has a black hole inside of him, your dick would be pulled off your body and be crushed down into nothingness you idiot_

**Richie:** _So you’re saying he would literally suck you off?_

**Richie:** _Is that why we never see Bowser’s dick despite the fact that he walks around naked?_

Eddie snorts. 

Richie has to disguise his laugh with a sudden cough.

Ben pauses for a moment, confused. Bill shoots them both a stern look which only makes them burst out in giggles again. The others all roll their eyes, but Richie still feels a sense of accomplishment. 

Later that afternoon Stan marches into his and Eddie’s office.

“Have you ever been birdwatching?” he asks Richie, without any other greeting preceding it.

“Um…no?” Richie replies.

“You should. I think you’d like it. You’re coming with me and Patty this Saturday. I’ll message you the details.” And with that he turns around and walks out. Richie looks over at Eddie to see if he can offer an explanation, but Eddie is absorbed in an email and doesn’t make eye contact.

So Richie decided not to question, not to let Dob or any other Voices state their opinion, but just to go ahead with it. He doesn’t know why he’s being invited to things, but the why doesn’t matter – he’s going to enjoy them while he can. Besides, birdwatching might be fun.

Birdwatching is not fun.

It’s looking at trees, and sometimes the sky, neither of which actually do anything or offer him a gun to shoot pixelated foes.

And you have to be so _quiet_. Richie’s had gotten pretty used to sitting there silently while others enjoy themselves, but over the past few weeks he’s finding that harder and harder. So when Patty gestures to him to leave Stan with the binoculars and join her on the picnic blanket, he gratefully scuttles over.

“Not your cup of tea?” she asks as soon as he sits down.

“Yeah, I guess not” he replies cautiously, not sure if she shares the same partridge passion that her husband does.

“I love the man, I like spending time with him no matter what, but yeah – birds are boring” Patty says bluntly and Richie chuckles.

“Would you like a capri-sun?” she asks, gesturing to the cooler she brought.

“That would be great. Thank you” he says, feeling guilty for stealing their drinks, but also feeling thirsty and stupid for having sort-of-assumed there might be a vending machine or something out here.

Patty hands him one, and he satisfactorily pierces it with the straw and takes a long slurp. Pauses for a second. Takes another slurp.

“Is that…gin?” he asks.

“Yep” Patty says proudly.

“How did you manage to get gin in this? It was sealed!”

She opens up the cooler to reveal a bottle of Sipsmith and a hypodermic needle. 

“Old trick I learned when I was a teenager” Patty explains, laughing at his bug eyes. “My parents used to make me attend all these tedious synagogue picnics.”

“And spiking juice cartons was the only way you could tolerate them?” Richie asks, amazed at how cool Stan’s wife is.

“Well, that and the rabbi’s son was cute.”

Richie giggles, and crosses his legs and leans forward, eager to hear more of Patty’s stories.

“He always wore these really tight slacks,” she continues, “so I used to drop things whenever he’d walk by so I could watch him bend over.” They both giggle at that, and Richie glances over to where Stan is standing, and finds out that actually he does have a surprisingly nice butt now that he thinks about it.

“Miss Uris-Blum, you are a scandalous woman, I do declare” Richie says, and he’s very happy with the laugh he earns in response.

“Oh please, are you telling me you never did anything like that because of a cute boy?” she asks.

Richie hesitates for just a moment, weary of revealing anything that shows her what sort of person he is, but he’s too eager for this conversation to continue to resist for long. “Okay so when I was 13 I had just moved to a new school,” he begins. “And in the first five minutes I spot the cutest boy and think that this must be the best school in the world.”

“Come on, give me details. What did he look like?”

“Short, huge dark eyes, dressed kind of preppy. I just wanted to put him in my pocket and take him home with me. So he’s signing people up for chess club, and I go up to him and challenge to him to a game. He says he only plays against people who are actually good so I have to tell him I’m a greatmaster prodigy just so he’ll play me.”

“Were you actually a chess prodigy?” Patty asks.

“Of course not, never played in my life” he says breezily.

“Oh dear. How did that go?”

“After five minutes of me just moving pieces randomly he got pretty mad. When I called the knights horsies he shouted that I was wasting his time and started throwing bishops at me.”

Patty makes a sympathetic sound and goes to place her hand on his arm.

“Oh don’t worry about it” Richie assures her. “It was pretty hot actually.”

Their raucous laughter is loud enough to scare off several birds, and Stan turns around to give them a dirty look, but neither of them mind. They spend the rest of the day knocking back spiked capri suns and giggling and talking about boys while Stan watches the trees and alternates between hushing them and laughing softly under his breath. 

*

All this time spent time talking with people, hanging out with people, enjoying i and them (seemingly) enjoying it as well…Richie is very unqualified to say this. But it sort of feels like having friends.

*

Eddie is not as direct as Stan, but without Richie ever really noticing, he somehow manages to wiggle his little self into more and more of Richie’s life, much to his confused delight. At first it’s just a case of Eddie sometimes continuing their chat in real life as opposed to on their personal or group thread. They’ll be sitting there quietly, each working on their own and occasionally messaging playful insults back and forth, when Eddie will become exasperated enough that he has to pull his headphones off, spin around in the chair and tell Richie to his face everything that’s so very wrong with his opinion on which is the best _Final Fantasy_. 10 minutes later they’re arguing and laughing loud enough that Bev has to grumpily stalk across and slam their adjoining door closed to shut the noise out. 

Then another time Eddie will just stay in with Richie during lunch and play whatever he’s playing, or Richie will follow him out to the sandwich shop because he doesn’t want to interrupt their conversation/discussion/bickering while they separate for food. After one very long and stressful day, when the delays and difficulties just kept building up and up, the shorter man sits back in his chair and makes that exasperated growling sound that only Eddie Kaspbrak or an agitated mongoose can make, and asks Richie if he wants to go for a drink after work. After a workday that rough Richie would say yes to a beer if it was being offered by a hillbilly wearing a sackcloth and carrying a pick-axe and muttering under his breath about how pretty Richie’s kidneys are, so he joins him at the bar without protest and they unwind with IPA and satisfying grumbling. And that’s pretty much how it goes. Without letting himself think about it, Richie just ends up saying yes to everything Eddie proposes and soon enough their time seems to be bound to one another (except for that occasion when Eddie asked Richie if he wanted to join him and Ben for a run tomorrow morning and Richie had just goggled at him silently in a kind of slack, uncomprehending terror. Thankfully, that had never happened again).

Even the first time he goes round Eddie’s place happens without drama or preamble. They’re just talking about a new game Eddie has that Richie might like, and when Eddie asks if he wants to come over to play it, he just follows it up with barely any thought for how he might get home later (though he does call his landline so he can leave a voicemail for Dobbin to tell him not to worry). Eddie’s apartment has a much more clear sense of décor than Richie’s, though not as much as Bev and Ben’s house, but it also has a great amount of what can only be described as ‘sanitised mess’. Like as soon as they enter Eddie drags him to the bathroom and sternly guides him through his twelve-step hand washing procedure before he’ll even let Richie so much as touch a controller. But then when Eddie goes to get the game he has to dig it out of an unordered pile – each box that he lifts off will get a quick but careful wipe-down for dust build-up before being unceremoniously chucked back onto the pile. There’s something very endearing about it all, and Richie’s begins to think of jokes about it to file away in his ‘things to poke fun about next time Eddie is too quiet’ file.

Admittedly, inviting Eddie around his own place is a rather more terrifying prospect, considering the only other corporeal beings who have ever set foot there before are his cat, his parents and the guy who delivers the wine. But then they’re talking about some vintage copies Richie has of a comic book they both used to read as kids and the invite just drops out of Richie’s mouth without ever visiting the brain and there it is – that small little smile on Eddie’s face, not the scowl or the smirk he gets most of the time, but the little confusing one that makes Richie feel weird – and any regrets he has from his hasty invite are hastily and discreetly smothered with a pillow. When they get there Richie sets about making them a couple of drinks, and he can hear Eddie walking around inspecting his flat behind him. “Oh, this is just disgusting, when was the last time you cleaned this?....Wow, is that an original edition?...How do you live in this warthog sty?...That’s cool, I’ve got one of them….Wait, is that – Dobbin?”

“Oh yeah,” Richie says turning around with the drinks, “I’m not sure what he’ll be like around someone new but –“

Eddie has crouched down by the sofa and has extended one wary hand towards the cat. Dob sniffs it once, looks back at Richie, then at the hand again and happily mashes his face into it. Eddie makes a little gasping sound and his face looks like a child who has just found Santa’s workshop. He begins to rub Dobbin’s head and asks cautiously, “So do I just scratch him, like, here?”

“Yep. Right…here” Richie says, guiding Eddie’s fingers to the right spot. Eddie’s begins to carefully scratch and Dobbin begins to vibrate.

“So I’m guessing you like cats then?” Richie asks, grinning.

“I don’t know” Eddie replies. “I always wanted one when I was a kid but my mom, she, well she didn’t want one. Thought they were, um, not clean enough. And then I guess ended up thinking they weren’t either. But – he is clean isn’t he?”

“Dude, he’s literally about to wash you right now.”

Sure enough, Dobbin’s little pink tongue comes out and begins to sandpaper its way up Eddie’s arm and he giggles and Richie gets that feeling again. Soon their plans to look at the comic books are forgotten and Richie digs out Dob’s old catnip toys and they spend the next hour playing with him and Richie doesn’t event want to poke fun at Eddie’s childish glee, he’s happy just getting to be involved with it. Eventually they do end up looking at the comics, and by the time Eddie is getting ready to leave they realise they haven’t seen the cat for a while. They scour the apartment without joy for five minutes before Richie notices something.

“Eds, is your bag – wriggling?”

Eddie lifts up the flap on his messenger bag to find a furry face staring innocently out at him.

“I can’t believe you were stealing my cat!” Richie cries in mock outrage.

“I didn’t! He must have crawled in there when we weren’t looking” Eddie protests.

“Oh, and I suppose you just didn’t notice the extra weight?”

“No! Dobbin is very light, actually he looks to be a healthy weight for a cat of his age.”

“I thought you never owned a cat?”

“Just because I don’t own one doesn’t mean I haven’t read how to take care of them” Eddie mutters, blushing.

Once they’ve coaxed Dobbin out, they agree to hang out again next week, with a vague promise of some sort of comic-related excuse to disguise the fact that Eddie probably just needs some more kitty time.

It does begin to feel a little bit like he and Eddie might be more than just friends. Richie hasn’t said any of this out loud to any of the Voices, and hasn’t even thought about it without first wrapping a pillow around his head so Dobbin can’t hear his thoughts, but sometimes he likes to think that they might be…best friends. Obvious these feelings are entirely asymmetric, Eddie already has five other much better best friends, but Richie hopes that one day Eddie might let him think of himself as a one-sided bestie. Now to achieve that they probably need to increase their topics of conversation. So far the majority of it has been about games and cats of course, because Richie understands that you should talk about topics of mutual interest, though not directly about work, with friends (thanks Siri); but if he wants to be best friends they have to talk about deeper stuff (thanks Alexa). Luckily, Eddie is several steps ahead as he always is. He begins telling stories about his life with the rest of the Losers, much to Richie’s delight.

“Okay, so I met Bill and Stan the first day of kindergarten actually. All the other kids rushed off to play together and we were just sitting there by ourselves, way too scared to do anything else. But eventually I noticed Stan was trying to clean something off his shoe, and he was just not doing it right. Like at all. So I marched my little legs over there - “

“Little huh?” Richie interjects.

“Shut up” Eddie continues. “So I walk over to him and tell him how to do it properly. Or rather I whisper it, I’m too nervous to talk normally. But when we get it clean, Stan just stares at me a moment and then gives me what has to have been the stiffest hug a 5-year old has ever given. Then he offers to show me how to alphabetise the bookcase as a way of saying thank you.”

“Did either of you actually know the alphabet?”

“Not a clue. But Bill evidently did, because after five minutes of me and Stan trying to work out the difference between a B and a D, he toddled over and told us.”

“That’s cute.”

“Yeah”, Eddie sighs wistfully. “Of course with his stutter he couldn’t actually say B or D, but eventually he hit upon miming them with his arms and we figured it out.”

Richie thinks this is adorable. He knows he’s supposed to offer some sort of equally adorable story in return, and thus achieve bestie bonding, but he can’t think of anything like that. “On my first day of kindergarten,” he says after a pause, “I think I was also just sitting there for a while. Eventually I decided the best way to introduce myself to the other kids would be to show them something cool, and obviously the coolest thing I knew of back then was glitter. So I hit upon demonstrating this by upending a bottle right into this poor girl’s hair.”

“How did that go over?” Eddie asks.

“Let’s just say she came back to school the next day with a crew cut.” Eddie giggles and Richie begins to think there might be something in telling embarrassing stories about himself after all.

The more anecdotes Eddie regales, the more Richie drinks them up. They make Eddie’s life sound so idyllic and Richie just wants to press his nose against the glass and stare like a Dickensian orphan peering at the plump goose in the window of the shop. Even the bad times sound good the way Eddie tells them. “So after my first ever break-up, just before Thanksgiving in freshman year of college, Mike takes me out for ice-cream to cry into and Bev then spikes it with rum. I’d only met them the week before. We all get roaring drunk and for some dumb reason we decide to egg his car.”

“I’m sure he deserved it” Richie says.

“Oh he did, the cheating bastard” Eddie replies. “But it was unfortunate that it turned out to actually be his roomate’s car.”

In between his guffaws, Richie’s mind is racing, set buzzing by the little word ‘his’. Eddie likes guys? That was huge! That means…something right? Like it feels like a big thing, but why? Is it just because he’s never had a queer friend before? Are they supposed to do something about that? Like Pride together? Shoot rainbows from their mouths? He has no idea, but the buzzing won’t stop.

“So, what do you after a break-up?” Eddie asks once the laugher subsides.

This question stings a little. Obviously, Eddie knows Richie doesn’t do anything after an entirely hypothetical, unrealistic event, and rubbing his nose in it doesn’t make him feel great. But being playfully mean to one another is sort of their thing, so he shrugs it off and doesn’t make a big deal of it. “Congratulate them on their laser eye surgery” he says eventually. Eddie laughs, but gives him a weird look.

Richie also reads that queer friends can be quite touch-feely with one another, which does sound nice. Yet Eddie hasn’t really had any physical contact with him outside of first-bumps since the big night out, not even that time _AOE_ Monday accidentally turned into Margarita Monday. But then one day when they’re around Eddie’s place after work, and Eddie is harping on again about how ridiculously tall Richie is, a joke does come out of him. Now, Richie has always thought being a lanky string bean is no good for anything other than head rushes after standing up too quickly, but he also knows that some people think that being tall is attractive. So, naturally, the line that he trots out is “I bet you like a big strong mountain man don’t ch’a? Think they’re real purty like?”

“Why are you talking about big strong mountain men while doing your cowgirl voice?” Eddie asks.

“Oh, because you’ve set my mind all of a bother!” Richie responds, switching to his lady-in-a-Jane-Austen-novel-who-needs-smelling-salts voice. He holds the back his hand to his swooning forehead and pretends to faint onto the sofa, landing face-up with his head lying in Eddie’s lap.

Eddie stiffens. Richie freezes. Eddie’s hand jerks itself up onto Richie’s chest as if to push him off. Then it sits there still. They both stare at it. Slowly, ever so slowly, the stiffness begins to seep out of it, and it relaxes, centimetre by centimetre the fingers splay themselves across his chest. 

After a few moments more Eddie mentions some show he’s been meaning to watch and the conversation starts up again. Richie continues to lie there, and Eddie’s hand continues to sit there as they chat. Richie is pretty sure this is what heaven must feel like.

From then on, touch becomes a lot more normal. There’s nothing weird about, Richie is sure this something normal friends do (not that he’s qualified to make such a statement) right? Normal friends keep an arm slung around the shoulder, poke one another to get their attention, sit on either end of the couch facing one another and alternate their legs between them. Right? A few days later, they’re at Richie’s place having a minor horror movie marathon. They’re curled up next to each other, leaning in together, both of them perhaps being a little more creeped out than they’re willing to admit. Which is objectively wonderful of course, but it does make focusing on the movie rather hard, and Richie finds his eyes and thoughts drifting to the shorter man sitting next to him. It’s something that’s been happening a lot to Richie recently, not just thinking about Eddie all the time, but thinking about thinking about Eddie all the time. He knows he’s in no way qualified to judge this, but he’s been wondering if it’s normal to think about a friend, even an asymmetric best friend as much as he does. Should he really be wanting to spend all of his time around them? To feel so satisfied whenever they’re in physical contact? To devote hours to thinking of ways of making him laugh, and feeling itchy and twitchy whenever he doesn’t pay attention to him for too long? To…

Just then, Eddie’s little finger curls ever so slightly around his and Richie realises.

Oh.

_Oh._

Oh shit. 

Richie likes Eddie. Like, in feelings with him. He should have recognised it, but this is so much stronger than Conor, or any of the handful of guys he’s crushed on from afar since then. When did this start? He doesn’t know. Oh god, does Eddie know? No, he can’t have done, he wouldn’t be here right now, sitting up close and spending all this time with him if he did.

With that thought, the geyser of guilt erupts inside Richie. How could he do this? All Eddie wanted was someone to hang out with, play games and banter with, but that wasn’t enough for Richie was it? No, his selfish brain kept demanding more and more, refusing to accept what it had, demanding to devour everything it could get its lazy hands on. After Eddie had graciously _gifted_ him his friendship, Richie had taken that gift and twisted it into something perverse. He had spent time with him, worked with him, confided in him and Richie had only demanded more and more. How would poor Eddie feel if he knew what Richie was thinking of, that he was thinking these terrible things about him? After Eddie had taken pity on this pathetic little hanger-on, and even been able to find some small morsel of value in him and his company, for the leech to then violate that trust and force feelings upon him that Eddie never wanted, that would repulse him if only he knew about them. Was it just because Eddie was gay that Richie thought he was entitled to feel such feelings? The various Voices begin to yell and jeer, and Richie can see them all standing around the room. He can barely hear the movie over the sound of their thoughts, every insult, every mean thing that has ever been said to him cascades over him, and he knows, knows more than ever before, that he deserves every single one of them.

How could he. Why would he have done something so shameful.

Richie is revolted in himself, but he doesn’t do anything other than sit there and feel filthy. The one thing that terrifies him most of all is revealing anything to Eddie, partially because he doesn’t want to hurt him with the truth, but mostly because he’s too much of a coward. When Eddie makes a couple of jokes about the film, he forces a laugh but doesn’t offer any jokes back. When Eddie’s finger slowly uncurls from around his own, he is careful to not give any reaction whatsoever. At the end of the movie, Eddie makes his excuses to leave and Richie offers no complaint.

As soon as he’s gone Richie lies down on his bed, curls into himself and cries in shame. When Dobbin tries to nuzzle in next to him he gently pushes the cat away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: What does the Reddie fandom, which primarily consists of people in their late teens and early twenties, want to read about?  
> My brain: How about 2000 words about a medieval RTS game from 1999?  
> Me: But of course!


	7. Physics engine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As pressure at work mounts, something changes dramatically in Richie and Eddie's relationship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Avast ye lubbers, smut be ahead. Ye be warned.

Richie wakes up, soaked in shame. He cracks open an eye and can see from the alarm clock that he should really get up and get going if he wants to make it to work on time. But he doesn’t. The guilt has glued him to the bedsheets and he just lies there. Eventually, he manages to flip onto his back so he can stare at the ceiling, turgid with shame, and continue the scolding monologue from the night before. Dobbin creeps into the room, and a further spike of guilt stabs through Richie as he remembers how rude he was to his friend, so he motions for the cat to come up and sit on his chest. Richie lies there, silent and stroking, thinking and berating. 

_”So you’ve made a real mess of this haven’t you?”_ Dobbin asks in his disappointed-Dumbledore voice, which hurts more than anything else Richie has said to himself so far. He nods glumly.

“What’s my exit strategy Dob? I mean I suppose I can go back to working by myself, or freelancing, but no one’s going to want to work with me directly after I spurn an opportunity like this. The project can continue without me, I know it’s not great for me to just disappear half-way through, but they have the idea, that’s what mattered. Anyway, I have to get away from Eddie as soon as possible, I can’t exactly risk him getting dragged down any further by me not being able to control my stupid feelings can I?” Richie says all thins in a monotone, he’s been thinking it all night and saying it out loud is little more than a reflex action by this point, but part of him hopes that Dobbin will say something to the contrary, that he will let him spend a little more time with Eddie somehow.

_”You can’t do that and you know it”_ Dobbin says sternly. Richie looks down at his cat, trying to hide the trepidation and hope from appearing on his face. _“You can’t betray the Collective now by walking out mid-project. You know they need you. You also know that Eddie needs you. No, not in that way, don’t be an idiot”_ he says in response to Richie opening his mouth to object. _”But he does need you to continue to be his friend. He gave you that, you owe him to carry on regardless of your own dumb mistake. And most importantly – you couldn’t quit even if you tried. You need Eddie’s attention far too much and there isn’t anything on the planet that could make you give that up.”_

Richie bristles at that, his last vestige of pride perking up. “Whatever. I’m not that bad. I could quit if I needed to.”

It takes all of two minutes at work to prove Dob right. He couldn’t stop himself from begging for Eddie’s intention no matter what.

As soon as he walks through the door to the office, Eddie glances up and pauses the game. “Finally, about time you dragged your late ass into work” he says in that strict tone that Richie loves. Eddie offers up his fist and Richie bumps it, and then Eddie grabs him by the fist and pulls him down onto the couch next to him. “Okay,” he begins talking at high speed, “so we got the feedback from Bev and the playtesters on the first boss fight, and she has concerns about the difficulty level, which I think is kind of bullshit if we look at the fundamentals. I mean yeah I get it, we’re not doing Soulsborne here or anything, but…”

Richie isn’t even fully paying attention to what Eddie is saying anymore, he doesn’t need to. He’s too busy thinking about the buzzing in his hand where Eddie held it, and is spending far too much time focusing on exactly how many millimetres are between them right now to pay attention to something as mundane as words. He watches Eddie’s mouth move as he speaks, and those little twitches play across his face that he does instinctively whenever his hands are busy and he can’t gesture dramatically with them the way he really wants to. Speaking of hands, he’d never really noticed just how _long_ Eddie’s fingers are for a man of his stature, but watching them now dance elegantly and confidently across the controller is making Richie feel a little warm. But yeah. There’s nothing on earth, no amount of shame or angry berating Voice that could make him give this up.

He tunes back in to hear Eddie say “…so I was thinking the way around it is to keep the upped speed and damage output, but increase the highlighting of the weak points. See right here, the opening isn’t very tell telegraphed, but if I penetrate –“

“Penetrate eh?” Richie asks with a raised eyebrow, because by this point he can’t not say something. “I would love to penetrate you-“ _Shit. No. Too close, way too close_ “-your mum. With my massive…wang” he finishes haltingly.

Eddie sighs, pauses the game and turns to face Richie. “I’ll believe the alleged ‘massiveness’ when I see it, but till then forgive me for my scepticism. And secondly my mother’s nursing home has a very strict policy when it comes to visitors, so I doubt they’ll let someone like you into the place no matter what sort of so-called ‘wang’ you claim to be bringing, so frankly I don’t think your plan really has a great deal of merit.”

“Oh shit, sorry Eddie” Richie gabbles, mortified he’s made the situation worse by hiding his feelings underneath Eddie’s bedridden mother.

“Please, don’t worry about that” Eddie says. “She’s been in that nursing home for 10 years now telling me that she’s on death’s door the entire time. But last time I visited I arrived early and found her doing Zumba in the day room. Came back an hour later to see her huddled dramatically beneath a thin blanket and she started staring wistfully out of the window as soon as she spotted me. But once we’re quite done discussing my hag of a mother and your genitalia, can we get back to work? So, weak spots…”

They end up having a productive morning with only half a dozen more dick jokes between them.

And that’s pretty much the dynamic from then on. Richie must be even blinder than he thought for him not to have noticed just how long he’s been like this around Eddie, but now it seems so much more intense. The need to be around Eddie, to touch him, to feel their bodies connect in anyway, to be insulted by him, to have his attention on him – it’s almost overwhelming. Above all though are all the endless thoughts and shameful fantasies of being _more_ with Eddie, of holding hands, of kissing him on the cheek or getting to stroke his hair, or even, at night when he’s shut his bedroom door so Dobbin can’t see what he’s thinking, of other things he dares to imagine. All these rotten little wants that he knows he shouldn’t have, but he just wants them anyway. 

Eddie thankfully remains unaware of the secret, and for whatever reason, seems to continue wanting Richie to be his gaming buddy. Having that with Eddie, a friendship that is better than anything Richie has dreamed about since he was 11 years old, but is also so much less than what he greedily demands, feels better and worse he’s felt before. Maybe he just _feels_ so much more than ever before.

Feeling is pretty much all he does now, he’s certainly not thinking about the whole situation. He can’t allow it. No analysis of the problem, no pep talks, no planning, just doing and feeling. He doesn’t let the Voices get a word in edgeways, doesn’t even let Dob say anything other than a meow or a purr. He’s too far gone for that now, for reflection. It’s sucked him in too deep, he’s too _compelled_ to do otherwise. Richie feels like a time-traveller, sent back from the future to stop some terrible event, but unable to intervene for fear of causing a worse fate and doomed to watch the disaster grow irreparably closer while everyone else carries on blindly. Sometimes he thinks that he’s in a made-for-TV movie that opens with some slow-mo car crash and any second now he’s going to hear his voiceover narrate – “So. I bet your wondering how I ended up in this situation. Well, it all began when I got an email from a Mr Bill Denbrough…”

The moment it all comes to a head, the point at which the car smashes into the wall and some slow, synthy song starts playing ( _”Mmm whatcha say?”_ ) comes far too soon for Richie’s liking. They’ve been contacted by a journalist, Samir, for a major gaming magazine, who wants to cover the new game and who wants to talk to Richie specifically. When Bill brings this up in the morning meeting, Richie freezes in his chair, unsure if he’s actually supposed to agree to this, or laugh off such a ridiculous idea. _The Clubhouse Collective_ want him to do PR? Like, _him_ him? This seems like a bad idea, and the only thing that manages to coax a wary nod from him is Eddie volunteering to do the interview with him, so they can give the piece an ‘old hand and new blood’ angle. As soon as the meeting ends Eddie grabs him by the elbow and steers him back to their office, where he plonks him down in a chair and passes him a glass of water.

“Okay, so I’m guessing by the whole anaemic vampire thing your skin is doing right now that you’ve never done an interview before?” Eddie asks casually.

“Is that what gave it away?” Richie chuckles weakly. 

“Don’t worry about it. You’ll be fine, good actually. You’re passionate about the project, just let that come across. Worst come to worse, just imagine that you’re talking to me. But without the-”

“Massive wang references?”

“Yeah, maybe keep those to a minimum.”

Eddie keeps up a steady stream of encouragement and advice for the next two days, none of which really helps. By the time of the scheduled Skype call, Richie is absolutely bricking it. Thankfully, Samir starts by mostly asking Eddie questions, who responds with practiced ease, talking naturally and clearly about the project, their new experiments with survival horror and the lessons they’ve learned from the previous failure of _The Silver Lady of the Water_. Richie’s leg is jiggling incessantly just off camera, and he thinks that Eddie’s steadying hand on his knee is the only that’s keeping it from vibrating clean off at the joint and bouncing wildly around the room.

Then Samir addresses him directly. “So, Richie. The solo developer of quiet indie hits who stayed in the shadows is now working for one of the highest profile developers around. Quite the change – what’s it like?”

Richie takes one quick, deep breath and tries to do what he’s been advised and just imagine that it’s another Eddie on the screen right now. Yet that just makes his throat tighten and his fists clench. He’s half-considering staying silent and sinking to the floor, or maybe keeping completely still and hoping Samir thinks the connection has frozen, when quite suddenly he decides not going to see Samir as Samir or even as Eddie, but rather as a whole crowd of identikit Samirs. No different to any of the other imaginary crowds of people and Voices that he’s spent years talking to. And so his mouth opens, and words come out. 

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing man – when you stop working by yourself at home you have to start wearing clothes.” Pause for laughter. “Yeah, really! They don’t even let you air-dry yourself while coding, it’s a real adjustment. But still…” And with that Richie is talking, just going on for who-knows how long, not watching Samir at all, but at all the other Samirs sitting just behind him, and without really understand what’s just happened, he finds himself wrapping up with “but seriously, working with geniuses like this is one hell of a privilege, and they’ve saved my skinny hide on more than one occasion. If it weren’t for this guy sitting next to me, I’d still be demanding that survival horror games make the player literally have a heart attack whenever they die. Eddie was the one who pointed out we should save that for DLC.”

“Okay, I think I’ve got what we need here” Samir says between his chucles. “Thanks guys, this has been great. You two are one hell of a double act” and he assures them the article will be up in a few days and ends the call. 

Richie exhales for the first time in five minutes and all the blood rushes back into his head.

“Was that…how did that go?” he asks, his hands beginning to tremble again.

“Um…you were there right?” Eddie responds. “That went good. Really good. Are you sure you haven’t done this before?”

“I just had no idea what I was doing” Richie says, the realisation of everything he said, and can only half remember now, is dawning on him. “I think I just…talked.”

“Yeah. Obviously. Isn’t that what you normally do?”

Richie looks at him in bafflement.

“Well, okay when you first came here you were as quiet as a ball-gagged church mouse,” Eddie says in a tone that sounds like’s he telling someone that the sky is blue, “but since then talking is what you do…right?”

Huh.

_Is that what I’ve been doing?_ he asks himself.

Now that he thinks about it, talking without filter has been something that happens a lot nowadays. But unlike all the years that came before, no one ever punched him in the gut for it.

Huh.

“Wait a minute,” Richie says, snapping out of his reflection. “Why would a church mouse be wearing a ball gag?”

“Please. Everyone knows that religious rodents are always the kinkiest” Eddie shoots back, and with that they start a long debate about the effect the occupation of a mouse has upon it’s sexual preferences, all of it being said, Richie notices, without filter.

This new-found confidence is very alluring, but as the time from the interview grows, and the release of the article gets closer, Richie feels his bravado dwindling the wrong way down the hourglass. By the time he gets the message from Samir saying it’s dropped, when he’s sitting on the bus back home on a Thursday evening, he’s a nervous wreck. His thumb hovers that taunting blue link, unable to just press it down to the screen and face the plunge. He’s no stranger to negative feedback after all, and is pretty much the master of moving schools or blocking comments and then dealing with that criticism in a healthy way by imaging them as a series of illusionary people taunting him till he drinks and cries. But this is different. If he’s gone and fucked up here then he’s damaged Bill and Mike, Bev and Ben, Stan and everyone else who works for _Clubhouse Collective_ , and most of all Eddie, the poor guy who got stuck with sitting next to the fool who spouts off his inadequacies. 

It’s a good ten minutes of staring at that link and picturing everything that it contains before another message pops up.

**Eddie:** _You read it yet?_

**Richie:** _No_

He debates for a moment as to whether or not to send the next bit, but then figures that Eddie will already know.

**Richie:** _Too scared_

The next message takes 75 seconds to appear.

**Eddie:** _You want me to come over so we can read it together?_

Richie smiles at the way Eddie has said the perfect thing again.

**Richie:** _Yes please_

After 24 minutes of pacing the length of his flat back and forth, he hears the knock on his door. He ushers Eddie inside and they sit heavily on the sofa, one on either side of Dobbin, Richie’s tablet between them.

“Okay, how do you want to do this?” Richie asks.

Eddie shrugs, uncharacteristically quiet. 

“Do you want to read it out loud?” Richie asks, pressing a little more this time.

“What you think I’m not nervous too asshole?” Eddie bites back. Richie blanches for a moment. The idea of Eddie being nervous about something had never occurred to him before.

“How about we alternate?” he suggests timidly. Eddie nods. They both swallow. They don’t hold hands, but they do each lay a finger on Dobbin’s front paws, so they form a human-cat-human chain. Richie taps the link.

Eddie reads the first paragraph, Richie the second, and then the third in Dobbin’s voice (he’d told Eddie some time ago that he likes to give Dob a voice, though obviously not that he relies on the cat for critical life advice). Then it’s Eddie’s turn again, then Richie’s and then Eddie-as-Dob and so on. Once they reach the end Richie isn’t sure he absorbed more than a tenth of it, but a few words and phrases have stuck - _incredibly innovative – a project that is both a bold new direction and inherently familiar – new blood and veteran hands – something that promises to bring both immense heart and immense terror – I cannot wait_. Richie feels like’s pulling himself out of a diving pool. He turns to Eddie who looks back at him with a rapidly-broadening grin. 

“Richie I think we fucking nailed it.”

A laugh bursts up from deep inside Richie and explodes into the room, and brings with it a fire of exultation that burns through his body. He still can’t entirely process it, but he knows, much more clearly than he ever has before that he did _good_. Because, more than the approving lick Dobbin has given his fingers, more than proud smile Eddie is sporting, more even than the total absence of Voices in the back of his head or anywhere in the room, is the proof – genuine, professional praise from one of the most highly-acclaimed gaming writers, right there in black and white (well, charcoal and white, fucking hipsters).

“Yeah we fucking did Eds.” Richie has the most satisfying fist bump of his life.

“Okay, we have to celebrate,” Eddie exclaims. “What have you got to drink?” He walks over to the fridge without waiting for an answer and opens it. “Richie…do you have nothing but rose and prosecco in here?”

Richie smirks, too elated to be embarrassed. “Are you really that fussy Eds?”

“Guess not.” Eddie pulls out a bottle of bubbly, grabs the cork and pulls it out in one strong tug, which causes a sudden jolt in Richie’s nether regions, which he covers up by opening Spotify and putting on his ‘Tunes for when Eds is here’ playlist. They spend the next couple of hours drinking, quoting bits of the article back and forth to one another until they know it nearly verbatim, joining in the flood of celebratory and congratulatory messages on the group chat, and (once the second bottle has been opened) dancing with Dob. 

After a while, the group chat dies down, and Dobbin takes himself off to bed, leaving the boys to their antics. A slow song starts playing and Richie puts on his most suave voice and asks Eddie, “Would you do me the honour of this dance m’lady?” To his pleasant surprise, Eddie takes his proffered hand and then _pulls_ Richie right into his arms. “Okay,” Eddie says. “But I lead.”

Giggling, Eddie steers him playfully around the room. They both laugh at the ease with which Eddie dips him, and then laugh louder when Richie tries to do the same and almost drops Eddie on the floor. The alcohol and victory are burning deep inside Richie and he feels immensely happy. But as the music continues to play softly and intimately, slowly that fire is burned away by the much more intense heat of being so close to Eddie Kaspbrak and Richie is left incredibly aware of all the physical sensations that are electrifying him right now.

Eddie’s small hand nestled deep in Richie’s much larger grip.

The strong arm wrapped behind his back, holding him tight.

The slight scent of Eddie’s cologne.

The sight of Eddie’s freckles, barely visible in the dim light.

The expression on his face, softer than Richie has seen before.

And those huge dark eyes, staring up at him. As the seconds drag into minutes, and their dancing slows to just a gentle sway, the emotions and thoughts swirling in those deep brown pools begins to move faster. Richie wishes he could read those eyes as well as Bev could, but even he can understand the story of discomfort and trepidation that they are telling right now. He knows how wrong it is to turn this joke into a feeble attempt at intimacy, and how uncomfortable Eddie must be with it, with their hips are practically flush to one another. He should let go, step back and laugh it off and get them both another drink to banish the memory of it, but he can’t. His selfish, greedy self doesn’t want to stop holding Eddie’s hand and gaze into his eyes and be held by him. ’10 more seconds’ he tells himself, ‘just 30 more seconds and I’ll let go, I promise’. The hesitation and nervousness only grows in Eddie’s eyes, but still Richie doesn’t stop staring into them, no matter how much his self-disgust mounts. Eddie opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again and says in a whisper so soft as to be barely audible.

“Can I kiss you Richie?”

Richie doesn’t comprehend the words, not really. It’s only instinct that makes him nod his head, because if Eddie Kaspbrak asks something of you, you don’t question it, you say yes. So when Eddie raises himself onto his toes to press his mouth against Richie’s, he doesn’t understand what’s happening. The signs are there, the feel of a mouth, the blurry sight of Eddie’s face being much too close, the slight tightening of his fingers around his wrist – but none of it comes together in a coherent picture of what’s actually happening. It’s only when Eddie pulls back and lowers himself down, and peers anxiously up at Richie and the regret begins to swim its way to the surface of his eyes, does Richie understand what just happened. Such is his horror at having missed it, the one chance to feel this, that all his consideration for Eddie’s feelings are thrown away, crushed under the disdainful foot of his arrogant selfishness.

Richie pushes his face forwards, closes his eyes and kisses Eddie. This time he feels it. The firm softness of his lips, the soft puff of breath as he lets out a gasp, and that taste – not just the prosecco and pretzels, but the taste of something else, of something uniquely Eddie. ‘2 more seconds’ he tells himself, ‘2 more seconds of this before I pull back and blame the alcohol’. But then Eddie makes this little sound, half a sigh half a groan, and God. 

He kisses back. Fiercely. 

Eddie lets go of his hand, wraps it around the back of Richie’s neck and drags him down, as if he’s trying to pull Richie right into himself. His tongue cautiously enters his mouth, and Richie’s knees buckle. He has no idea what to do, he just tries to copy what Eddie does as Eddie licks into him and he struggles to keep up with his flirting tongue.

Then Eddie pulls back, just a little, and snatches Richie’s bottom lip between his teeth, and Richie whimpers. That apparently does something to Eddie, because he growls, he actually _growls_ deep in the back of his throat, and he separates their lips and walks Richie back a couple of steps and pushes him down onto the couch. He straddles his hips, tips Richie’s head back and dives back in. Their kissing grows more frantic, Richie’s head is spinning, lost in the heated sensations. He knows he’s hard, knows that Eddie can feel it as he grinds their hips together, and Richie thinks he might be hard as well as they kiss hungrily. Eddie’s hand snakes into Richie’s hair and _tugs_ and Richie lets out a sound he’s never made before. He opens his eyes and snatches a glimpse of the ceiling above, before Eddie’s mouth attacks his neck and they flutter shut again. 

Oh. 

So that’s why people always reacted like that when someone kisses their neck. Richie is thankful he’s already sitting down because his legs turn to jelly. Then he feels Eddie’s teeth nip the skin and jesushellohtittyfuckingchristthatfeelssojawdrippinglyincredible. The thought of doing the same to Eddie is the only thing that can make its clear way through his hazy mind, and he’s just building up the courage to maybe do so, when a sharp vibration begins running through his leg.

Eddie curses and pulls off Richie’s neck. He fishes in his pocket for a minute and pulls out his phone. Richie can just catch a glimpse of the alarm symbol on the screen before Eddie swipes it away. Eddie looks down at him, his face flushed, his eyes blown and his lips obscenely wet. He’s breathing heavily and looks ready to pounce again, but then he closes his eyes for half a second, takes a single deep breath through his nose and climbs off Richie’s lap.

“Shit, I’m really sorry Richie, but I got to go” he says hurriedly. He stops looking at Richie, turns away and hastily gathers his shoes and jacket, while saying, in a decidedly positive voice, “But seriously, well done. We absolutely smashed it with that article. Great work.”

“Hate to rush, but no choice. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Eddie opens the front door and goes to leave before pausing. He turns around, walks quickly back across the room, makes eye contact and seems to hang for half a second. Then he leans down and gives Richie a kiss on the cheek. Stands back up, walks out of the door and closes it behind it him. 

Richie is left sitting alone on the sofa, confused and tingling. 

*

Richie isn’t sure if he sleeps that night, or if he just spends it in an uncomprehending, semi-conscious haze. He knows his brain is trying to run a program to understand what happened, but it isn’t even loading. There are no results, he just tries, hangs and fails to come up with an answer. _Whirr…clunk. Whirr…clunk_. Over and over, but nothing. _Whirr…clunk_.

Once his morning alarm goes off he drifts back to what should be full consciousness, but everything still feels sticky and out of focus somehow. There is a damp prickling on the back of his neck and he finds himself staring suspiciously at everything. When he opens his front door to leave for work, he half expects it be made of plywood and to find light rigging and crew members standing around on the other side. On the bus to work he looks around for hidden cameras. The feeling of unreality doesn’t disappear with the familiarity of the office and all the people he knows there, he keeps expecting to see two identical black cats walk past in quick succession or a spinning top to rotate endlessly. 

What he though happened can’t have happened.

Surely.

When he gets to his and Eddie’s room, the other man isn’t there and for a moment Richie thinks he might have imagined not just the whole of last night, but his friend in his entirety, and that he’s actually just been bickering with a shorter Tyler Durdan this entire time. But then he spots the post-it note telling him to go the conference room, and he duly follows the instruction of Eddie’s handwriting in the vague hope that he’ll find answers there.

Eddie is to be found there, along with all the other Losers and a dozen or so other staff members, all buzzing around, darting between phones and laptops and binders and making the room busier than Richie has ever seen it before, even as he watches it all from behind his treacle haze. But no one asks who he is and what he’s doing in their workplace, they all say ‘hello’ and ‘good morning’, except for Eddie who’s on the phone and merely nods. When he finishes the call, he claps his hands together and calls out loudly to everyone in the room.

“Okay, thank you for coming everybody. As you all know, the article that dropped last night got a lot of attention.” Richie dumbly pulls his phone out of his pocket, and sees dozens of notifications. “We weren’t expecting to have to do press releases this early,” Eddie continues, “so we hadn’t planned for this and now we’re going to have to handle it on the fly. We are wall-to-wall with interviews, features and podcasts so we are dropping everything else for today and putting all hands on deck in tackling this. Ed ad Larry are going to be co-ordinating the schedules,” he indicates behind him to where the two interns are moving post-its and bits of string around a whiteboard and muttering to one another. “And I’m going to be handing out the assignments. Stan and Ben, you’re going to be doing design and technical background, give them both aspects of the art and science of it all to show them how we’re pushing both directions. Bill and Mike, story, characters, make sure you keep your whole cute couple thing going, you know what to do. Bev and Richie you’re going to be rotating doing the central pitch of what the game is all about and why everyone should start tweeting about it.”

“Everyone good?” He pauses to wait for assent. “Good. Now get out there and tell everyone just how fucking awesome we are, because what are we?”

“Fucking awesome” answer Ed and Larry in sync.

“Damn straight. And if I see anyone slacking, I’ll jam this whole whiteboard up their ass. Get to it.”

Everyone breaks off or queues up to get their assignment from Eddie, and Richie joins the line without really thinking about it. There is no way the little Napoleon standing there can possibly be the same man who was grinding on him 9 hours earlier. One of them has to be an illusion. Yet the very real and solid looking General Kaspbrak is slapping a schedule in his hand and telling him “Okay these are your interviews for the morning. Just do what you did yesterday” with a slight smile, and then Richie’s feet take him back to his office.

The next few hours are filled with endless calls and conversations and Richie doesn’t have any time to comprehend the unreality of it all. It is strange though how easy the interviews seem now, but Richie finds imagining them all as being before a large audience continues to help. Sure enough, it isn’t long before he’s getting laughs in all the right places, and he ends up reusing some of the lines from the conversation with Samir as well as inventing new ones. The phone conversations are harder without anyone to see, but he starts visualising himself as talking to characters from the game (his usual succession of imaginary people are much too negative for this) which works pretty well. Richie loses himself in the work and oddly enough almost seems to be enjoying it, but whenever he does have thirty seconds between calls his mind jumps straight back to trying to make sense of what he remembers from last night. _Whirr…clunk_.

Whenever he runs out of tasks, he goes back to the conference room and Eddie, who is always knee-deep in conversations and emails and a million other things, hands him more to do. But then at one point, after Richie is coming back after his late slot on a ‘virtual lunchtime livestreamed pod chat’ (fucking hipsters) he walks into the conference room to find Eddie there alone, sitting on the table and swiping on his phone. Eddie looks up, glances around the room and then this smile appears on his face, one that Richie hasn’t seen before. Eddie tilts his head down a little, his shoulders hunch slightly and he swings his legs. A slight flush appears on his face. He looks almost…bashful. There is no way this is the same person who was barking orders out earlier or the one who was sucking his neck the night before. Richie half expects another identical Eddie, an evil one this time to burst through the door and twirl his moustache and declare his intent to claim all the inheritance.

But then Eddie is standing up and walking slowly over. Still wearing that new smile that makes Richie’s knees feel weak, he reaches up and cups Richie’s face with one hand. He stands up on his tiptoes and kisses Richie slowly. With Pavlovian instinct Richie begins to kiss back and brings his hands up to rest on Eddie’s shoulders, but he’s responding to a very different master to the one he saw last night, this one is slower, less fierce and more tender. 

Just when the whirring in Richie’s brain threatens to finally make a connection though, the door creaks open and Eddie jumps back like Richie’s lips were hot stoves. “Okay, so Buzzfeed were very happy with the images and the video clips, but they wanted to know more about the literary and film sources we’re drawing the horror mythology from. So Eddie I was thinking – oh hey Richie, how’s it going?” Ben asks, looking up from his tablet. “I was thinking I get back with Bill and Mike and maybe try and finish off that inspiration infographic if you’re okay with us skipping that conversation with the YouTuber who does the thing with zucchinis…”

“Yeah, just give me a moment.” Eddie says, moving post-it notes around on the whiteboard. “Oh, Richie your next calls are on this” and he pulls off a piece of paper and passes it to him without even looking.

Richie takes it and slips out of the room.

*

Richie doesn’t see Eddie alone for the rest of the day, every time they’re together there are others buzzing frantically around. By the time the calls dry up, and Richie is slumped on the bus home, he’s exhausted. The kiss though has upgraded his mind into, well not exactly high-gear, but a better connection than the whirr…clunk it’s been all day. The sound of dial-up might be buzzing in his brain but that kiss definitely happened, which means that the kisses last night almost certainly happened as well. But when he goes to Ask Jeeves and types in _what the hell does all this mean?_ the egg timer just sits there and the little blue bar creeps along like an anesthetised sloth. He ends up pulling out his phone and just staring at his chat with Eddie, desperately trying to think of what to say. What does one message someone who pounced on you the night before disappearing in a puff of smoke, only to ignore you at work, secretly smooch you and then throw an invisibility cloak over you as soon as someone walks into the room?

Jeeves has no results.

Richie and his raft keep on drifting.

Eventually, after twenty-five minutes of slow traffic, all he comes up with is:

**Richie:** _…?_

After two minutes the three dots and a question mark come up as read. 

After another seven minutes of traffic, three of clear streets, and a six minute walk and eighteen minutes of pacing back and forth in the flat staring at his phone the message stays as read and Richie cannot see land anywhere.

With a muttered swear, he gives it up as a bad job. Realising how sweaty he is after the busy day, he decides to take a shower, so he strips off and turns it on, waiting for his crappy heater to kick in, tapping his foot and continuing to contemplate everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours. Normally he avoids looking at himself in the mirror in these circumstances, with no urge to dampen his day with the sight of his pale, bony body, but this time he accidentally catches a glimpse of himself just as he’s stepping into the shower. Now, obviously there’s nothing attractive about this particular naked man, but a naked man is still naked, and that apparently is all it takes to get a rush order for some sort of super-fast fibre wire connection, because all those thoughts about last night are now coming through in ultra-clear high definition. As he starts soaping himself up, those images and gifs of Eddie sitting on top of him, his tongue down his throat and his hands tugging his hair start coming thick and fast. The familiar guilt for thinking these thoughts is still there, but now he just can’t help himself, the stiffness between his legs and the feel of his hands over his body are crushing that shame beneath his arousal till even the memories aren’t enough. He begins wondering what Eddie’s own hands would feel like running over his chest, perhaps pausing to pinch a nipple, before running down to grasp his hard cock. Would it feel different to what he’s doing now? Eddie’s hands were smaller sure, but he imagined them having a much firmer grip, a thought that punched a quiet groan out of him. He envisioned Eddie walking into the bathroom right now, flinging open the short door and walking right in, still in his work clothes, the spray making them cling to his body. Richie slid one hand around behind him, and began to stroke his hole, thinking of Eddie doing the same thing. He’d only just lubricated a couple of digits with shampoo and begun pushing them eagerly into himself when he was interrupted by –

ba-ba-ba-wa-wa-WA-WA…DA DA DA!

The familiar sound of Link opening a chest, aka Richie’s novelty doorbell, echoes through the apartment. With an angry swear Richie turns the shower off and steps out of it and begins hastily patting himself somewhat dry. 

ba-ba-ba-wa-wa-WA-WA…DA DA DA!

“Yeah, yeah I’m coming! Give me a minute!” he shouted back, not bothering to keep the frustration out of his voice. Why hadn’t he trained Dobbin to answer the door already? He stalked into his bedroom just to grab a pair of boxers and a white t-shirt and quickly check that his wilting boner wasn’t showing too much, before stomping over to his front door and wrenching it open.

Eddie was standing there, still dressed from work, holding a plastic bag and staring at him.

Richie was suddenly very aware of how exposed he was with his hair was still dripping, and the t-shirt already clinging to his torso. He shirted uncomfortably on the balls of his feet.

“Hey Eds” he says to break the silence.

Eddie swallows and stops looking at Richie’s ridiculous Wreck-it Ralph boxers and meets his gaze. “So am I coming in or what?” he asks.

Richie steps aside and gestures him in, unsure as to what exactly it is he’s doing here. Eddie might spend a lot of time at Richie’s, but he’s never arrived unannounced before.

Undeterred by Richie’s hesitancy, Eddie sweeps into the room, drops the bag on the floor and pulls a bottle of cabernet sauvignon out and grabs a couple of glasses from Richie’s cupboard, talking the entire time. “Okay I brought this, because obviously your taste in wine is frankly embarrassing, and I thought it‘s about time that I introduced you to something proper, and anyway I thought maybe we should be celebrating again after today, but then I thought maybe not, maybe actually it should be mourning, because I’m really not sure what that Buzzfeed piece is going to be like, I don’t think I really got across what I wanted, and then I thought that you might want –“

Eddie ranting is hardly an unusual occasion, but there something different about it right now, he seems to be almost humming with energy as he uncorks the wine and pours them both generous measures. Richie has no idea what to say but figures he better say something before the shorter man vibrates through his floor.

“Well firstly Eds, don’t insult my taste in pink juice. And secondly, what the hell are you worried about? You slew it today. Again” he says and he’s rewarded with a smile from Eddie and the slightest little pause, before Eddie runs his fingers through his hair, messing it up, and forcing a glass into Richie’s hands.

“Come on, try that. It’s got this strong oaky flavour you should really learn to appreciate” Eddie commands.

Richie takes a big, exaggerated sniff and declares “Ah yes, I can really detect the notes of the weeping willow.”

Eddie snorts. “Yeah whatever dumbass, just drink it already.”

Richie takes a sip and…damn. That really is something. He tries to look disaffected as he takes another slurp and lets the complex flavours roll around in his mouth, but naturally Eddie sees right through it. 

“See that’s what good wine actually tastes like” he says victoriously.

“Fine. Maybe you might be onto something here” Richie concedes, sitting down on the sofa and curling his bare legs up in a poor attempt to hide just how very naked they are.

Eddie flops down next to him, sighs and just nonchalantly drops his hand right onto Richie’s leg and begins circling his thumb casually over the skin and Richie almost chokes on his gulp of wine. Eddie doesn’t even seem conscious that he’s doing it as he frowns again and begins talking. “But how did you think today went? I mean I just woke up to this barrage of emails, and I guess I kind of panicked and ended up telling everyone what to. I just demanded that everyone do what I thought, and it was probably a really bad idea, I mean I just dragged poor Ed and Larry into the conference room and began ordering them around…”

“It was great Eddie. We wouldn’t have been able to handle that deluge of requests without you taking charge. I mean no offence to Ed or anything, but you are the better Edward hands down,” Eddie wrinkles his nose a little at the usage of his full name but Richie continues unabated, “and you don’t even need to be chained to some other intern named Larry to actually do your job. Plus when I saw you standing there like a little general – it was kind of hot actually.” Richie knows he shouldn’t admit this last part, but the feel of Eddie’s running his fingers through his fine leg hairs is depleting his brain cells away at a rate of knots.

“Really?” Eddie asks.

“Sure. Like a sexy Patton.”

“Wait is that what you’re into? Bald, bloodthirsty tank commanders?” Eddie giggles.

“Well, he’s no Eisenhower or anything”

“’I like Ike’ huh?”

“Please Eddie. Tell me you’ve never wanted to just bend Montgomery over the hood of a Sherman.” This time Eddie almost chokes as he snorts down the remainder of the wine. He picks up the bottle and refills both of their glasses.

He still looks nervous though, and Richie doesn’t know what to do, which is why he says, “But seriously Eds. You did brilliantly today. Proud of you.”

The smile appears again and Eddie meets his gaze directly. Then his eyes stray down to Richie’s lips.

“You’ve got a little…” he says in a heavy voice and he swipes a thumb across the wine stain at the corner of Richie’s mouth. Instinctively Richie reaches up to catch his hand, perhaps desperate to feel for himself that Eddie really is touching his fucking mouth, and Eddie gets this _look_ in his eyes.

he forwards, stopping just an inch from Richie’s lips and he asks “Is this okay?”

Richie makes some sort of inarticulate sound of agreement, and then they’re kissing again, and Richie wasn’t just imagining it and indulging in some sort of one-day-old nostalgia, it really does feel this fucking good. A few short seconds later and Eddie’s tongue is pushing hungrily into his mouth and Richie’s is meeting it, and it’s absurd of course to think that he knows what he’s doing and is better at this than last time, but somehow he does feel more confident as their tongues begin to fight for dominance. Perhaps that’s why Richie puts a hand on Eddie’s chest, and it’s _solid_ , when he curls his fingers and drags his nail down the pec it doesn’t budge an inch, and then Eddie makes this sound his throat and he pulls back. His eyes are wide are blown and hungry.

He stands up, grabs the plastic bag with one hand, and with the other he hooks a finger around the waistband of Richie’s boxers and _pulls_ him up and marches him to the bedroom. Richie’s pretty sure Eddie can feel the stirring that’s beginning to brush the back of his knuckle, but he can’t even care right now, because the sight of Eddie’s curled fingertip poking out the fly is just so fuckingincrediblelooking.

When they barge into the room, Dob looks up from where he’s curled on the bed with a soft chirrup. Normally Eddie would start fussing and cooing over the cat at this point, but this time he just barks out “Dobbin – leave” in a stern voice. The feline slinks out of the room and Eddie shuts the door behind him. Then he opens up the plastic bag and pulls out a complete set of bedding that, judging by the smell, is freshly laundered.

“Okay, we’ve got to change your sheets first because frankly I’m not doing anything on something that gross.”

And while Richie has no prior knowledge of what foreplay consists of, he never would have guessed it involves fitted sheets, or that stuffing a quilt could be quite that arousing. His mind is swimming and hurtling along at the same time, like’s he’s strapped to the front of torpedo and has no choice but to hang on and see what happens next. That’s why, when he glances over and sees Eddie hastily changing a pillowcase, he can’t help but let the torpedo guide him into saying “So, bet you always imagined me wearing a French maid outfit am I right?”

Eddie drops the pillow, and flushes as he picks it up and jams it messily into the case. “I had thought of you more in some fancy butler outfit, but yeah, that’s not bad” he says.

“Oh well let me tell vous monsier.” Richie says in his sexy French feminine voice, “zis isn’t a feather dusterrr. Zis is moi –“

“Enormous wang” they finish together.

Once they’re done Richie stands there awkwardly for a moment, unsure what’s supposed to happen next and whether or not he’s supposed to get the hoover out, but then Eddie locks eyes with him and nods at the bed. He follows the invitation to sit on his own bed. Eddie then _crawls_ up the bed towards him, places a hand on his sternum and lowers him firmly down before climbing onto his lap and kissing him passionately. They make out hungrily for a few minutes, and just when Richie is beginning to think he’s got the hang of this, Eddie detaches and starts nipping down his neck and ohmygodtheresthatfuckingpoint. Richie lets out a full body shudder and sinks down into the mattress as Eddie’s teeth take hold of his pulse point and his lips seal into the most delicious vacuum, before he lets go, gives a couple of gentle kitten licks as an apology, before attacking Richie’s collarbone. After a few seconds of greedy bites, each of which punches a new sound from Richie’s throat, Eddie lets out a frustrated growl and without any more preamble he grabs the bottom of Richie’s t-shirt and yanks it upwards, dragging it feverishly up his torso, over his head and up his arms. Just when it begins to get tangled in his wrists though, Eddie halts and stares down at the exposed man below him. Richie swallows and wants to say something, to try and excuse the lank stretch of flesh that’s on display, but he’s cowed into silence by the predatory look in Eddie’s eyes as they roam up and down.

“Jesus, you just go down on forever don’t you?” he asks before he leans down and wraps his lips around a nipple and teases it with his tongue. _Holy shit. Whoever would have thought that nipples could be that sensitive?_ Richie thinks in surprise, as Eddie gives it a quick nibble before kissing across and giving the other nipple the same treatment. Richie squirms on the fabric softened-sheets like’s he’s trying to escape, but Eddie is still holding him down by the t-shirt bound around his wrists and Richie’s whimpers at the feeling. Even when Eddie lets go to scrape his nails down Richie’s side while he licks a zig-zag down his belly likes he wants to taste every inch of his skin, Richie keeps his arms there because he isn’t sure if he’s allowed to move them, and God, that does things to him.

When Eddie reaches Richie’s boxers, his hardness is bulging shamelessly and Eddie gives it the most delicate brush with his fingertips before he looks up at Richie with hooded eyes and asks “Is this okay?” Richie nods without thinking, and Eddie just yanks his boxers down and throws them over his shoulder into the corner without shifting his eyes from Richie’s face, which Richie knows is flushed and sweaty, but he doesn’t care right now. When Eddie’s eyes look down and he just stares for several long seconds though, Richie begins to squirm uncomfortably.

Eddie looks back up at him.

“Massive wang eh?” he asks with one arched eyebrow.

“Well maybe I was exaggerating…just a little” Richie says awkwardly.

“You don’t say?” Eddie enquires, gesturing to Richie’s entirely average-sized dick with a smirk.

Before Richie can make further excuses though, Eddie looks back down and shrugs. “Fucking gorgeous though” he says and he swallows Richie down in one. This time Richie feels like he’s floating above the mattress because he never, never would have imagined anything could feel like this. It’s so warm and wet around his cock, both cavernous and snug all at once and like nothing he’s felt before and Richie thinks Eddie has just gut-punched him with the Infinity Gauntlet so head-spinningly overwhelming does it feel. 

Eddie’s nose is buried in his pubes when he inhales deeply, and Richie thanks the gods that he used that strawberry-scented shampoo that Eddie said he liked, and then Eddie lets out this satisfied hum and the vibration courses down his cock and up his spine and fuzzes his brain much too much for Richie to think of thanking anything. Eddie slides slowly back up, his lips pulling off with a loud pop, and Richie just has time to get one deep gulp of air in before it’s pushed out his mouth again as an embarrassing whimper when Eddie kitten-licks his tip. Then Eddie wraps his lips tightly around his cock again and he sinks, slowly down this time, sucking all the way. As he reaches the base, Richie can feel his throat wrapping around him and his tongue slavering desperately up and down and around and then it goes on and on and Richie, for a man who talked so much, never knew that were so many things someone could do with a mouth.

Eddie pulls off again, and gives a series of quick bites to Richie’s inner thighs, nuzzling his head inbetween them till he can see Richie’s entrance, and it might be absurd to feel exposed now after everything that’s happened, but Richie does feel bare more than ever. Eddie swipes his tongue over his pucker once, lets out a contented hum, before sitting back up and leaning over the side of the bed to rustle in the bag and extract a tube of lube. He asks Richie if he’s good with this before squeezing some out onto his fingers and warming it quickly.

When he slips one finger between his legs and begins to slide it gently around his rim, it slips in with only the slightest pressure and Eddie lets out a surprise coo. “Were you…in the shower?” he asks. Richie should be mortified, but he’s lying there start naked while this gorgeous, fully clothed man looms above him and inside him, and he can’t do anything but blush and nod. Eddie bites his lower lip, before opening his mouth again to ask “Were you…”, but then shaking his head slightly and leaning down to watch himself at work burying a second finger deep inside.

This is the first sensation Richie’s felt all evening that’s actually familiar, but Eddie’s expertise in this particular field is apparently leaps and bounds ahead of even Richie’s hours of practice. “God, you’re so reactive” Eddie’s voice rumbles lowly, but Richie can’t help his how leg twitches as Eddie’s fingers glide over his walls, how his heels dig into the mattress as Eddie scissors and stretches and how his hips buck off the bed every time Eddie touches _that_ spot and rubs it mercilessly. 

By the time Eddie pulls his fingers out, and grabs a wet wipe and a condom from the bag, Richie’s whole body is shivering. Eddie quickly cleans his fingers and grabs the condom, looks at Richie directly and again asks if Richie is okay. Richie’s voice has disappeared somewhere, but he manages to offer a weak thumbs up. Eddie grins and begins to strip off his clothes, and Richie wants to touch him because god, Eddie really does have actual muscles beneath his shirt, but his hands are still tangled and he doesn’t think he can do anything more than lie there and watch like he has sleep paralysis and Eddie is the sexiest hallucinated demon standing naked at the foot of his bed, and holy shit, he looks so thick….

Then Eddie is sliding the condom on and pouring more lube onto his cock, and positioning himself between his legs and he’s slowly pushing in before Richie has even got his head wrapped around the fact that _Eddie fucking Kaspbrak is fucking naked_. Again, this sensation should be familiar, Richie’s had enough fingers, toys and, during his teenage years, carrots inside of himself (luckily Maggie never seemed to question why they kept running out) that he should be used to the feeling of something blunt and hard driving into him, but this is something else all together and with every inch it pushes the air out of his lungs. 

When he bottoms out, Eddie lets out a shudder and stares into Richie’s eyes and stays stock-still, and the stretch inside of him feels like so fucking much but at the same time not nearly enough. Richie nods in the hope that it will get Eddie to do something, anything, and he does bring one hand towards his cheek for a second, before moving it again to grab hold of the t-shirt around Richie’s wrists, while hooking Richie’s shaky legs behind his back with his other hand. He keeps the eye contact though, staring just as deep into Richie as he’s buried his cock, and Richie manages to match the stare as Eddie pulls his hips back and slowly inches out of him all the way to the tip, but when he drives back in Richie can’t help but screw up his eyes, tip his head back and whine.

Eddie settles into a rhythm, long slow strokes with the full length of his cock, pulling almost all the way out before burying himself to the hilt. “God, you’re so fucking _tight_ ” he says in a strained voice, but that’s all he says, other than a series of moans, as he drives into Richie. Richie doesn’t say anything back either, he can’t, his mouth is too busy gasping heavily, and then whimpering when Eddie rams his prostate and then letting out a series of desperate high-pitched cries as Eddie begins to pound it faster and faster.

He wants to do something, anything that might give Eddie even a morsel of the pleasure that Eddie is giving him, but he can’t do anything but lie there and get _fucked_. A couple of times he tries clenching, which makes Eddie groan and slam in harder, but he’s too caught up in the sensations of it all to do anything else. 

The sound of their skins slapping together mingling with their shared groans. 

The feel of his ankles slipping down the sweat-slick skin of Eddie’s lower back as he tries to keep them in place.

Tingling in his rim each time Eddie’s hips drive his cock home, and the way his walls are pushed aside and the spark each time Eddie’s grazes his prostate. 

Dampness on his belly from his cock leaking shamelessly.

Strain in his wrists from where Eddie holds them down.

The way they’re sharing one another’s breath, punching it out of one another’s bodies as their faces hover inches apart.

And the look of Eddie’s eyes, huge and dark and deep, staring into his own.

Overwhelming.

It seems to go on forever, but some part of Richie’s brain knows it isn’t long before Eddie’s rhythm begins to falter and his hips stutter. He reaches down with one hand and swipes it back and forth over Richie’s belly, gathering the pre-come there, before wetting his cock down and stroking it in a desperate off-rhythm and it builds and builds and Richie’s eyes flutter with the effort of keeping them open. But then Eddie leans down, his mouth right by Richie’s ear and he whispers.

“Come for me Richie.”

And Richie thinks that a hadouken has been shot into his body. As the blue plasma courses through him, burning from the inside out, it makes his spine arch up off the bed, his muscles constrict and tighten, his mouth cry out and the come shoot out of his cock. Eddie lets out a final deep groan before closing his eyes, tipping his head back and slamming his cock to the hilt one last time before bucking and shuddering as he climaxes.

When Richie phases back into consciousness he sees Eddie still looming above him, breathing heavily and holding himself up on trembling elbows. He thinks he can see something that looks almost like trepidation behind those eyes that are darting around Richie’s face, and somehow he knows that he needs to say something.

“10 out of 10, would play again.”

Eddie giggles, before re-positioning and pulling stingly out of Richie with a groan. He ties the condom off, and then looks down at his hand and Richie’s chest that are soaked in come and wrinkles his nose. 

“Ugh. Come on Richie get up, we need to clean you up.” Richie continues to lie there bonelessly. “Yip yip Richie”.

“You’re kidding me right Eds? You just fucked me into the mattress and now you expect me to get off it?”

Eddie huffs and rolls his eyes, but then grabs the pack of wet wipes again, cleans his hand and wipes down Richie’s torso in a way that feels both clinical and tender. Once’s he’s deposited the condom and used wipes into the trashcan, he clambers back up on the bed and collapses next to Richie. He rolls onto his side, buries his face in his neck and throws one arm across his chest. It doesn’t make sense after every incredible thing Eddie just did to him, but the feel of his warm breath on his neck and the finger stroking aimlessly up and down his shoulder, still might be one of the best feelings Richie has felt all evening.

Suddenly the door bangs open as Dobbin headbutts his way into the room and jumps up onto the bed with a yowl.

“Sorry Dob, but I promise he wasn’t murdering me in here” Richie says to the cat.

“Sure fucking sounded like it” Eddie snorts.

Dobbin pads over and wiggles himself between the two men, settling down with a purr and for the next few seconds as they all lie there, Richie’s eyes staring hazily up at the ceiling and his ears buzzing, he feels his soul blast into orbit.

But then he feels Eddie stiffen next to him, and he looks over only to see him slip off the bed, stand up and start walking around the room gathering his clothes. “That was great” he says, “but I really have to go again.”

He dresses with Fring-like precision and efficiency, even though his face is still flushed and his hair still rumpled. Once he’s done he sees Richie just lying there and staring uselessly and he says casually “Don’t worry about getting up, I know my way out.”

Then he looks at Richie with an expression that Richie isn’t familiar with, before he walks over, gives Dobbin one quick scritch behind the ear and bends down and plants a tender kiss on Richie’s cheek. 

“See you soon” he says with a friendly smile and then he walks out.

Richie lies there on the bed with Dobbin once more and he feels used in the best and worst way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: Isn't it weird how Richie works at a major video games company, but we only ever meet 7 other people who work there?  
> My brain: But what about the incredibly fleshed-out characters of Ed and Larry????


	8. Unlockable character

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie Kaspbrak has never been able to function by himself no matter how much he wishes that he could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the long wait, but in my defence I didn't even think this chapter was going to exist till I realised it had to!

“God fucking damn it” Eddie muttered angrily to himself, as he strode up and down the chains looping around his and Richie’s office. The palms of his left hand stung from where the marker pen was jammed into it, gripping it with the sort of fierceness normally reserved for when one was dangling off a cliff or strangling someone. Not that he minded, not really, the pain was a good reminder to focus, to concentrate on solving this puzzle of his own making.

He was trying to work out how a particularly important scene would work, one that came right at the end of the first act of the game and would set up a very tough boss fight. Bill and Mike had thought of the idea of the player coming across an illusion the monster had created where he had captured two of the other kids and now forced the player to choose which one to save. Once the monster had killed the child the player hadn’t picked, the player and the survivor would fight a manifestation of the monster that fused together the two characters’ particular fears. After they’d taken down the werewolf/leper hybrid or whatever, it would be revealed that it was all a trick and the unchosen child was alive and well, but the choice would affect the relationships for the rest of the game.

Everyone had been enthusiastic about the idea at the time – it gave an emotional gut punch right before a major fight which should fire the player up, and then fills them with guilt afterwards when they have to face the kid they’d picked to die. The different hybrids the monster might form meant multiple boss battles in one and majorly increased replayability. Thumbs up all around the conference table.

What none of them anticipated at the time was just how complicated this would be. Because of course the player could be playing as any one of the seven different playable kids, they had to have different options for each of them. The characters had been set up so some were already close to one another, so the two best friends would always have the other as one of the captured children for instance, while the new kid character would have a more open set of options. But then you had to factor in the choices the player had made so far, which other kids they’d chosen to go on missions with, the dialogue routes they had picked, how much of the in-game lore they had explored, whether or not they’d done all the side quests yet or powered ahead with the main plot – branches and branches of options that all had to come down to a single binary choice. Plus he had to think about how the scene would set up the resulting boss fight – the ghost woman and ghost dead sibling naturally came together, but how could he make the lumberjack/clown fusion work? 

The end result was Eddie stalking between the chains of post-it notes and red string that were now covering the desk, walls and floor, swearing to himself every time he had to move something around, or discovered that he’s missed a whole character pairing out altogether, and had to stand on the chair and start laying out options on the ceiling. He was fully aware that if Richie could see him right now, then he would start spamming him with that meme of the crazy guy and his conspiracy board.

God, Richie. That was the other problem, that this ridiculous, enigmatic man kept lumbering into his thoughts. Every time Eddie tried to focus, to work out that if he moved this over there, then _that_ would have to go over _here_ , and wham there was Richie poking him in the back of the head to tell him a joke he’d just thought of. If he tried to write notes about some horrible fleshy monster fusion on the whiteboard, he instead just remembered the taste of Richie’s flesh, the way his body moved and clenched underneath him. As he span around and around in his spindly chair thinking about how one character might react to the player choosing them to die, he would see the horrible sad look that Richie wore some of the time, and he would feel guilt squirm inside him and not know why. Most of the time though, he could just sense Richie watching at him, staring at him from the empty doorway.

But of course Richie Tozier was not standing there at all, Eddie was the only person in the office this Sunday, the only one who’d had to come in to fix a problem he’d created. Because this obstacle was entirely of Eddie’s own making, while Bill and Mike might have suggested the idea, he was the one who’d volunteered, who’d demanded that he work this issue out by himself. He sort of knew why he’d done this, if he’d been in a Woody Allen movie (not Woody Allen in real life of course, he wasn’t a monster) then he’d have paid an analyst a large sum of money to tell him that this ultimately came back to his mother’s shadow looming over his relationship with video games.

It had been her who had first introduced her to them, when he was little she’d spent hours playing them with him, helping his tiny hands learn the buttons and congratulating him on how well he was playing. She’d been so nice about it as well, nurturing his interest, introducing him to all of the five video games that were available in the entire world, including some very rare ones. She’d even helped him all the time, taking over for the hard bits like boss battles. And fighting. And jumping. But only because he wasn’t good enough to do those parts and he would have to rely on his mommy, because she was the only one who’d been able to do them and he _needed_ her.

But then one day, when he was 9 years old, he was finally allowed to go round his friend’s house (Stan, not Bill because his mommy had decided he was a nice polite boy, and not a dumb brat who couldn’t even learn how to talk), and he’d been so excited. The three of them chatted about games all the time, and Eddie had loved the way they’d talk about games they’d made up as well as real ones, though he didn’t think he was clever enough to do the same. So when they all bundled into Stan’s room and loaded up _Spyro_ he’d was almost jittering with enthusiasm at being able to play the very best game ever with the very best friends ever. Yet when the time had come to fight the first Gnorc, Stan hadn’t called his Mom to come and do it for him, instead he’d just headbutted him and flamed him _all by himself_. Eddie’s jaw dropped, and he stared wordless and amazed at the way Stan just kept on playing happily without having to close his eyes at the violence. 

When Stan eventually messed up a jump and plunged to his death, he passed the controller over to Eddie’s trembling hands. Still nervous that this might have all been a trick, he copied Stan and charge-flamed the first Gnorc and…it worked. The enemy died. And he died easy. Eddie had done that by himself, and he’d done it so much smoother than mommy ever had, just a quick clean one-two attack without any fumbling or muttered ‘oh gosh’es under his breath the way she’d done because “it was just so difficult Eddie-bear.” He giggled through the entire level.

And then Bill had suggested they play something else, and it turned out he and Stan hadn’t been making it up. _Mortal Kombat_ was a real game, and they hadn’t just been bad at spelling. The first time he saw Bill kick Stan’s head off Eddie’s eyes practically exploded out his sockets, and when he’d managed to pull Bill’s spine he set the word ‘shit’ out loud for the first time ever and then laughed fiercely. Because this was just so COOL. He practically demanded that Stan show him the rest of his games, and begged to be able to come over day after day to try them all. When that was all done, they started sneaking over to Bill’s instead, and playing the games he had, and they let him borrow them and he’d never been so happy in his life. He never played with Sonia again.

As the years went on, they did actually start coming up with ideas for their own games for real, and Eddie had participated in all those discussions with enthusiasm. But there was something inside of him that made him keep a few of those idea just to himself, to detail his notes and his drawings only in a secret notebook that he kept hidden under the floorboards and not tell his friends. He knew he was being silly, that they were nothing like his mother, but there was still that little feeling in the back of his skull that told him that one day they might take his ideas away and use them themselves, just the same way she’d taken his controller away and only let him watch. 

When they went to university together and met Mike and Bev and all started talking seriously about setting up a development company upon graduating, Eddie had nodded along and not told the others about his secret plan. It had all blown up the day after graduation, the day he saw Bill cry angry tears for the first and only time since they were kids and he’d let Georgie ride his big-boy bike only to topple off and break him arm. He told the others that he wasn’t joining them as he said he would, because he wanted to work solo. The argument had ended badly with him stalking out of the room, clutching his arms to his chest and determined to make it on his own.

It had taken less than a year before he admitted defeat, having not gotten a single project off the ground, completely unable to manage the varied workload of coding, designing, testing, marketing, funding and so many other tasks that just went on and on and under whose weight he’d buckled and collapsed. It was the most shameful day of his life the day he’d submitted his anonymised resume to the junior job posting at The Clubhouse Collective, but it ended up being the most cathartic day of his life when he went into the interview room and the others had rushed out from the other side of table and enveloped him in a hug. He’d cried with relief into their arms, the arms of people whom he hadn’t even spoken to in months but now welcomed him back no questions asked, just happy to have him back with them once more. Back where he belonged.

For the first few months working there, he’d been super careful about not working on his own, only starting a task if there was someone else with him, making sure to get approval for every little job that he did, and sending emails out to all the others to check in at each and every stage he reached. It had been Bev who had finally told him that they trusted him and he was allowed to do things by himself, that they did all trust him to not steal their work and run off into the night. So while he still worked closely with them all on each and every project, closest of all with Bev with whom he’d developed a particularly effective partnership, there were still times he’d throw an internal tantum and insist on working on a particular job all by himself. He knew it might not have been entirely healthy, but he also didn’t care, his sudden bouts of need for control overruling his concern about where this need really came from.

Sometimes he has to deliberately check himself to not be short or abrasive with his more junior colleagues, never quite able to silence that tingling in the back of his skull that tells him that they’re planning on leeching off his work, manipulating it for their own ends and taking it away from him. But that little voice is always silent around the Losers because they’re the people he loves and trusts more than anything. They’ve always been there for him, even when he poured gasoline and jet fuel all over the bridge between them and torched it, they brought him right back in. The Losers are the only people he needs.

So when Bill tells him that they’re bringing in an outsider to both provide the concept for and then stay and work on their new project, Eddie is _pissed_ and has no qualms about letting people know. He argues vehemently at the meeting against the invitation, ignoring the part of his brain that suggests the other’s arguments about them needing help with survival horror is correct, but is ultimately outvoted five-to-one. He spends the evening playing a couple of Trashmouth games, and the fact that they are actually pretty good only serves to anger him more. He ends up going to bed late, having researched long into the night everything he can find about this ‘Richie Tozier’ and muttering seethingly to himself that there is no way that he really is a solo developer. That self-made man crap is all bullshit, he must have other people working on the games who aren’t credited. Maybe he outsources some of his work and then claims he did it all himself, the lying bastard.

In the morning Bill mentions in passing that as Eddie will be working most closely with Richie that he should meet him in the lobby. The look on Eddie’s face is apparently all it takes for Bill to suggest nervously that maybe Ben should accompany him to even it out. The both of them have been waiting for all of 30 seconds when Richie walks through the door, and the fact that he’s tall, fresh faced and has the most ridiculous cheekbones is maddening. While he might admittedly be on time, the way he keeps avoiding eye contact, doesn’t know how handshakes work and appears to have dressed up in dad’s suit like it’s playtime or something is deeply annoying and Eddie is happy to tell him so. Infuriatingly though, Richie just laughs at this, and Eddie doesn’t really know how to respond to that.

When Richie is standing at the conference table he looks as if the last thing in the world he wants to do is tell everyone his idea, and Eddie assumes that he thinks it’s probably too good for the likes of them. Prick. When he does lay it out, clumsily and unprofessionally he might add, it’s…well…damn. It’s actually a really solid idea. How dare he. He knows this is a bad idea, that he should scream at everyone not to do it, that they don’t need him, but in the end he goes along with everyone and agrees that they should hire Richie. The idea is worth it he tells himself.

When he starts working with Richie it’s…odd. Like, he can tell the man is actually talented, but this talent only appears in fleeting snatches. A lot of the time Richie is really quiet, just not saying anything, but instead watching Eddie and the others surreptitiously, his eyes darting away whenever he gets spotted. And there is often so much emotion playing on his face, some of the time he looks furious, other times he looks like he was just forced to drown his puppy in the well, and Eddie desperately wants to know why. But then when he does talk, it’s brilliant. He has all these idea, and he adds onto all of Eddie’s, he takes feedback and responds well in a back-and-forth and when he gets going he can talk for hours, especially when it’s just the two of them, but then all of a sudden he may just clamp up, like a voice in an earpiece has told him to be silent. He works hard and comes prepared for sessions, even though he also apparently has no idea how meetings and scheduling works. And he’s funny. Like, really fucking funny.

Eddie can’t figure him out. He asks the rest of the Losers all the time what they think of him, or how he acted during a meeting that Eddie wasn’t in. They’re all very praiseworthy of him and his work, though they agree that he’s certainly an unusual duck, though, as Mike points out one day, they’re all pretty weird. When Eddie goes home at the end of the day, and deliberately stops himself from thinking anymore about work to avoid burning out (he’s certainly made that mistake before), but what he can’t stop doing is trying to work out what Richie is doing, what he wants out of all of this. What’s his game? Does he even have a game? Surely he must do, there must be some sort of plan here, something that he wants to take from them.

He voices all of this to the others on AOE Monday, listing off everything he’s noted down about their new colleague, which probably takes a good twenty minutes, before finally asking them “So, what do you guys think?”

No one says anything for a few awkward seconds. Then Stan, this ridiculous, withering candlestick of a man, has the audacity to look up from the furious duel his Samurai are engaged in with Eddie’s Jaguar Warriors and say “I think you like him.”

“W-what?” Eddie squawks back.

He looks around the table to find some support, only to find them all looking directly at him and nodding.

“You do talk about him all the time” Bev points out.

“And think about him. A lot.” Ben adds.

This is ridiculous, just because…it’s absurd to say that he likes Richie all because of the fact that…

Huh.

Okay, maybe they’re onto something.

“Well, what do I do about it?” he asks Stan snappishly.

“I don’t know. Figure it out” he replies in a wearied voice. “By the way, Mike is about is about to ambush your Mangonels.”

Eddie loses his Mangonels and the game, too caught up in his thoughts. He admits that they’re probably right, that he likely is attracted to Richie. Physically, he’s certainly Eddie’s type. He never thought that he’d have a thing for awkward, dorky weirdos before, but hey, there’s a first time for everything. This is just a passing crush of course, which is fine, he’s never wanted anything else. He’s very happy for Ben and Bev, and Mike and Bill and Stan and Patty but he can’t imagine wanting what they have. To be that reliant on something, to willingly split your entire life like that, just hand over all your vulnerabilities and trust that they won’t use them against you? No thank you. Eddie can’t imagine anything more terrifying. That’s why his relationships have never lasted more than a few weeks, strictly restricted to flings, casual hook ups and the occasional one-night stand. He’s sure that all he needs to do to get over this is the same thing he’s always done – bone the guy once, or maybe a few times, and then move on. That should get these feelings out of his system and down Richie’s throat, and he can get back to normal.

So he sets out his plan of flirting relentlessly with Richie until the problem is solved, using his favoured methodology of relentless teasing insults, interspersed with the occasional sincere complement. Admittedly it’s Eddie’s only flirting tactic, but it’s never failed him before. Till now. He keeps catching Richie smiling slightly as Eddie talks and letting out this weird breathy huff that sounds like he’s trying to hold something back, but whenever he looks over Richie’s face slips into blankness and his eyes drop to the floor. A couple of times he’s even tripped over chairs and bumped into doorways because he acts like he has to avert his eyes from the burning glory of god’s majesty every time Eddie so much as glances at him. Eddie even tries mixing in a few of his patented rants that Richie seems to enjoy in the periphery of his vision, but every time he pauses and makes eye contact Richie acts like he’s just been spotted by the prison warden and flushes his stash right off his face.

It’s all very frustrating.

He says as such when he’s at Bev and Ben’s movie night (movie night plus sliders, eclairs and 4 different types of margarita because Ben frankly has a problem), bemoaning the fact that Richie hasn’t noticed the new flirty Eddie even though it’s staring him right in the face – “Nothing back, no rejection, no ‘sorry I’m not into that’ just nothing! I hate it.”

“Um, do you think that maybe…” Ben asks tentatively from behind the blender.

“Maybe what?” Eddie snaps back before taking a deep breath and asking “Please?” in a more grateful tone.

“Maybe he hasn’t noticed the change because there isn’t a change?”

“What?”

“You’ve been doing all of this with him since his second day. Halfway through the first actually” Ben says matter-of-factly. “It took you four months before you stopped calling me ‘dear colleague’ in emails.”

Eddie knows by now to trust the advice of the Losers and he is nothing if not determined, so he takes this on board and starts asking Richie to join him for lunch. No dice, no matter how he phrases the invite. One day he decides to just straight out buy Richie some lunch and bring it back to the office for him (it’s not weird or anything that he knows his colleague’s taste for Mountain Dew, pastrami sandwiches and gummy worms). When he gets back to their office, Richie is playing _Totally Accurate Battle Simulator_ and he’s doing all these voices and he’s more animated that Eddie has ever seen him before and Eddie doesn’t know what to make of it. It’s funny of course, and absurdly cute and Eddie _wants_ him in a way he hasn’t before. This want isn’t the usual stabbing fierceness he normally gets with a crush or a hook-up, but something more liquid and bubbly that churns inside of him, and before he can stop it that ridiculous, embarrassing laugh of his, the one that only comes out on rare, humiliating occasions, bursts out of him. Richie jumps a little in his seat, turns around and when Eddie tries and fails to hold back his laughter, his face just lights up like someone jammed half a dozen lighthouses into his skull and suddenly Eddie doesn’t feel so embarrassed. 

But then the lights wink out all at once, like that same someone has now clicked a Deluminator and sucked the lights right out of the back of Richie’s head, and his face crumples as they go as if those lights were physical supports and now his skin is caving in on itself. He brushes past Eddie with a quick mutter of something about a bathroom and pays no heed to Eddie’s desperate attempt to say something that ultimately just comes out as a vague string of words about “You….lunch...okay…carry on...food?”

Eddie doesn’t know why that just happened. Was Richie embarrassed somehow? Did he think Eddie was laughing at him rather than with him? That didn’t seem likely, that was clearly supposed to be a funny routine, most of the voices were legitimately good, and even the ones that weren’t were endearing in a ‘okay, we’ll practice that one buddy’ sort of way. Was it some sort of secret routine that Richie was practicing, a set that he wanted to surprise everyone with at the company talent show? (Note to self – suggest company talent show in the next HR meeting). Maybe he didn’t like the fact that Eddie was just standing behind him and watching unannounced for a good five minutes like some sort of weirdo. Perhaps his comedy was something he shared for his real friends, and didn’t think enough of his workmates to waste it on them. 

He didn’t realise he had been sat there thinking for quarter of an hour till Richie came back in and Eddie hastened to look busy. From the corner of his eye he could see Richie look at the lunch bag that Eddie had placed on his desk, and casually brush it aside. Maybe that wasn’t good enough for him either.

The rejection stung, and the Richie Illuminations and Crumpling kept creeping their way into Eddie’s brain more than he liked, but he pushed all that aside to focus on the sheer irritation that this mystery was causing. Eddie was good at puzzles, he could work out how to combine the 4 missing emblem pieces into the shape of some unholy goat in order to unlock the broom closet, or some other sort of _Resident Evil_ nonsense, quicker than anyone else on the team, but this puzzle was making him pull his hair out in frustration. When the group chat brings up the fact that they haven’t had a big Loser Night Out in a while, the brute force option occurs to him immediately, it’s the prospect of actually doing it that makes him hesitate. Does he really want to bring someone who’s just supposed to be quick lay so he can rid himself of a bothersome hang-up into his beloved Losers Club, no matter how warming the prospect makes him feel? And can he even persuade the others to invite Richie, when Eddie was the one to tear the group apart last time, just for the sake of his dick? 

It takes Eddie a long time to persuade himself that this is something he wants to do, and even longer to prep his case to convince everyone else. When he tentatively puts the suggestion into the chat though, the yeses and thumbs up appear remarkably quickly, and Eddie is a little disappointed he never got to use any of the cue cards he’d made up.

What also catches him by surprise is Bev bumping into him in the corridor the next day and her saying that she’s going to walk in the room and invite Richie, just like there, and it’s equally unexpected just how vehemently Eddie argues that this an absolutely terrible idea, even though he can’t really explain why. He’s sure that Richie won’t respond well to a direct ask like that, he’s seen what can happen when the man is faced with something unexpected, but when Bev asks him to justify his angry assertation about this, he can’t bring himself to explain himself. Partly he thinks that he doesn’t want to violate Richie’s trust and tell anyone about the Crumpling when Richie probably doesn’t want that to be widely known. But there’s also the fact that somehow he wants it to be him and him alone who brings Richie into the club, that this is some private little thing that he owns, and this feeling makes him bare his teeth and defend his kill from the red-haired hyena that was trying to steal it.

Once he’s done with the argument, he takes a deep breath, and walks into the room keeping it super casual. Eddie Kaspbrak is a casual man right? He sits down, taps out random nonsense on his keyboard just long enough to keep it believable, glances over and Richie and says “This Friday we, the leadership team that is, are going to have a night out. It’s something we try and do pretty regularly, to have a night off with no work whatsoever, and just have fun.”

Silence.

He waits for an entirely casual amount of time before turning to face Richie and see if he’s reacting in anyway. All he gets in a rather ambivalent sounding “Oh.”

Okay, maybe he’s not doing a very good job of selling it. But he took that marketing module in college, he can do this. “Yeah everyone always lets loose, and normally gets very drunk, and then we spend the next morning nursing hangovers and trying to remember what on earth happened by comparing photo rolls. The place we go is very cool, they know we’re regulars and what’s we’re looking for.”

Richie just looks at him some more before saying “Sounds cool” in a way that sounds like thinks the complete opposite. 

“Yeah, it’s cool” Eddie tries again.

“Cool.”

Okay, this hasn’t worked, but he keeps the frustration hidden behind his masks of casualness, as he turns back to his computer and send Bev an angry message because she threw him off his game, and then decides that isn’t cutting it and he needs to go tell her in person. 

Strategy two is to double down on just how great nights out are, so he ropes everyone else in to help him. When he hands them their scripts, they all roll the eyes good naturedly the way he’s used to them doing whenever he’s on one of his quests, but once Mike has polished his (apparently) robotic-sounding dialogue, everyone goes ahead with the plan.

Bev almost ruins it though, when on Wednesday she apparently decides to put her ‘be direct’ tactic into motion, Eddie’s permission be damned. Eddie tries to gesture away when she comes barging in to no avail, and then has to adopt his super casual pose when Richie spots him. 

“Hi” she says to Richie.

“Hi” he responds back, sounding nervous. 

“So, this Friday. You in?”

“No” Richie says, and Eddie feels like he just had a bowling ball thrown at him. 

“Thank you though” Richie continues.

“How come?” Bev asks, trying to disguise the surprise in her voice.

“I’m, um, busy. I’ve got to call your – I mean, my mom.”

“All right then.” Bev finishes and Eddie glares at the reflection in his monitor of her walking out.

Strategy three is bring in the big guns, and let the master of niceness Ben Hanscom win the day.

No dice.

By Friday, Eddie is feeling pretty despondent. It’s the end of day and he’s lingering over getting his stuff packed up in the vain hope that perhaps Richie will change his mind at the last second, when his phone beeps with an incoming message.

**Bill:** _Hold my beer_

Bill walks in, high-fives Richie and asks enthusiastically, “Richie my man, you’re coming tonight right?”

Eddie can do nothing but stare in horror. 

“Oh, no I’m busy you see. Sorry” Richie responds quietly.

“No way dude! You have to be there, this is a big thing for all the leadership team. Mandatory attendance for sure, right Eddie?” 

“Right” Eddie agrees, feeling like he’s having a tooth pulled.

“Don’t worry, you’re going to have such a good time, you’ll love it. Bring your game face though buddy! Wooo!” And with that, Bill slaps Richie on the back, gives Eddie a victorious ‘told you so’ smirk and walks off with Mike.

“See you there” Eddie manages to mutter, ducking out quickly to hide his reddening face. He should be mortified at Bill just owning him that way, but that feeling is drowned beneath the excitement.

***

A few short hours later, that excitement has been washed away by a stormfront of nerves. He’s sat in the pub, fingers clutched around his fourth drink, and trying to keep up with the chatter of all the others, but really he’s much too busy staring at the door and trying to astral project and see if Richie is actually coming.

When the tall man finally walks through the door, and looks like he’s ready to turn around and flee from the weirdos who all shout-greet him, Eddie almost drops his glass. He takes a quick breath, walks nonchalantly and casually begins talking to him. He gets him a drink, offers to play a game with him, all cool and casual. It doesn’t take long before Richie has knocked back a couple of drinks and reveals…well, it’s not a new side of him exactly. It’s the exact same side Eddie and the others have been catching glimpses of since the beginning, but suddenly there’s just so much _more_ of it and Eddie is delighted by every second of it.

The evening passes by a little blurrily and messily, as these things always do, but Richie is on incredible form throughout. He’s flirty, he lets Eddie be tactile as hell with him, at one point he even confirms he likes guys. All signs are green, all signals go and Eddie is enamoured with it all. But there’s also something else there, more than the usual thrill of flirting and playing with a cute guy at a bar. Richie is fun as hell, but more than just in a single-use way. It’s a sort of fun that is both achingly familiar and also somehow entirely new. When they’ve all done their toasts and Eddie gives Richie his official welcome the Losers Club he’s surprised at just how meaningful it feels. 

When the night is over, and everyone is standing around outside and saying their goodbyes and professions of inebriated love for one another, Eddie sees Richie standing there on the sidewalk and he can’t do anything but watch him for a few seconds. He looks so beautiful in that moment, his eyes closed and a serene little smile on his face, the streetlight glinting in his dark hair and making his pale skin glow. It almost doesn’t feel right to just hook-up with him anymore, like he’s too…important for such a thing. But no. _That’s stupid, right?_ Eddie asks himself. This was the whole point of it all. Flirt with him, sleep with him and get it all out of his system. Right?

He sidles up to him, throws his arm around his shoulder in his patented move (struggling a little because of the height difference) and chats a little more. He can do this. He’s just brought this man into the group of friends than mean more to him than anyone else in the world, but they can totally hook up right now can’t they? Because that was the plan. The plan that was very important, he remembers that, even if he can’t remember why.

He takes the, necessary (for sure), plunge. “So…do you want to crash at mine?”

Richie looks at him as if he’s just suggested they sleep on the moon tonight. “Um, don’t you live on the other side of town?”

He must be teasing. Eddie teases back. “Well, yeah. But you know Uber’s a thing right?”

“Yeah, but I literally live a twenty minute walk away. Thanks for the offer though, that’s really nice of you dude.”

Oh. That’s unexpected. What did he do wrong? The signs were all there, the flirting, the touching, the teasing – what’s with the sudden rebuff? Richie continues to talk “You could totally crash at mine if you need to, but the couch is…well actually it probably is about your size. But if you sleep on it, my cat would literally murder you in the night for taking his spot. Sorry.” Which is nice of him to say and everything, but still, a rejection is a rejection.

“No, that’s good” Eddie says. The he looks back up at Richie, right into those eyes hiding behind those stupid glasses and just like that the sting of Richie turning him down is gone. He feels almost glad that his dick is going to remain bone dry tonight, no matter how odd that seems. It doesn’t feel like he really wants that anymore. “Glad I managed to escape your cat murder den” he says.

He fist bumps the other man and says “Goodnight Loser” and he means it. He watches Richie toddle happily off into the night like a tipsy giraffe before he climbs into his Uber. During the drive back he recounts the evening and he giggles the whole way.

***

His good mood lingers for the rest of the weekend, but it all comes crashing down come the Monday morning meeting. When Richie enters the room he greets him just as enthusiastically as the others, who were all in agreement in the group chat that their quiet colleague turned out to be a verifiable legend once there were a few drinks inside of him, but it doesn’t really have the effect he intended. Richie looks as if the entire group has just ritually sacrificed his kitten on the conference table. For the rest of the meeting they all shoot concerned looks at one another while trying to go through the motions, but Richie doesn’t seem to notice, just huddles on his chair and stares at his notepad, hunched into himself. 

At the end Richie just walks out, and Eddie follows him back to their office and Richie stands there, a blank look on his face. It’s like some weird parody of Friday night, he’s still just hovering on the spot and lost somewhere inside himself, but the look on his face couldn’t be more different. Eddie tentatively offers him a fist bump and asks if he’s okay but all that happens is that the other man looks at him and walks robotically out the room, and now it’s Eddie’s turn to stand there, blank and confused. The urge to do something is almost as overwhelming as his complete lack of ideas as to _what_ to do.

Bev spots him through the window and walks in. He looks at her, feeling frantic. “Richie…he just…I don’t…please” is all he manages to say, but that’s apparently enough for Bev who nods decisively and strides off in the direction that Richie went.

Eddie slumps down in his chair, feeling weighed down with guilt. He’s not entirely sure at first why this is his fault, but he’s sure that it must be. He thinks back to their night out, and how happy Richie had looked at that moment and now just how hurt he seems, and then he realises just exactly what it is that he did wrong – he asked Richie to come back with him. All the man had wanted was to have a fun evening with workmates, and Eddie had had to come along and ruin it. So what if Richie had said he liked guys, did that mean Eddie had permission to just turn him into an object like that? What Eddie had been determined to see as flirting might have just been banter to the other man. What if Richie was with somebody? Eddie had never asked, just assumed that he was single because that’s what Eddie wanted him to be, and now Richie had walked into work to face the colleague who had hit on him crowing about it with all his friends. The more he stewed about it, the more Eddie realised just how awful he’d been from the beginning. Manipulating all these situations just to try and compel an innocent person into sleeping with him. So what if Richie was the subject of Eddie’s infatuation, it didn’t mean he was obligated to help Eddie get over his problem.. 

After what felt like hours of furious internal criticism, Bev walked back in and he looked up at her pleadingly, desperate to hear that perhaps he hadn’t hurt Richie too badly. “I think he thought that…” Bev says haltingly, as if she is till trying to work something out. “I invited him to AOE Monday. I think that maybe…maybe he just wants some friends.”

Eddie nods, even though this doesn’t make any sense to him. Richie clearly already has friends, close ones that he doesn’t want to talk about with workmates, but if he wants some more then that’s fine. It’s about time that Eddie did something that Richie wants, rather than just what he wants. And now that he thinks about it the idea of being ‘just’ friends with Richie, real proper friends, well it’s not exactly what Eddie wants. But it’s a pretty good outcome nevertheless.

During the game that night, Eddie tries not to hog Richie or anything, or bother him by talking to him directly too much, knowing that while Richie might be enjoying their company as a whole, Eddie is still probably the last person he wants to spending a lot of time with right now. When Richie ends up leaving himself open to Ben’s Cataphracts, he breaks the alliance he’d proposed with Ben in order to save Richie’s ass, and he hopes this apology goes some way to making up for what he did. But then it ends up with the two of them teaming up against Stan, and then battling each other to the death, and Eddie can’t help but get absorbed into smack talking with Richie. Later that night once he’s back home again, he starts kicking himself for breaking his vow already and demanding Richie’s attention, but it did at least seem as if Richie enjoyed himself, and Eddie hasn’t hurt him so much that the other man can’t stand to be around him at all anymore. 

When he wakes up the next morning to find Stan has added Richie to the group chat he feels a great sense of relief. Because this is somewhere he can let out all his needy urges without harassing the poor man. At work he deliberately holds himself back, trying not to push and just act like the friendly colleague, but over WhatsApp he can engage in all the flirty bickering he wants to. Well, within reason, he tries to moderate himself a little, but he can’t resist the bait a lot of the time. On some level Eddie knows that it doesn’t really make any sense to think keeping it all digital is an effective restraint on his desire, but Richie does seem happy enough with the arrangement. He hasn’t ever looked like he did that horrible Monday morning again at the very least, so maybe Eddie can learn to want this and keep his other desires sensibly boxed up.

Sure he does miss their night out, not just the drinking and the playing, but the chance to spend time with Richie in the real world by themselves, and not have to share him as he does at their group hangouts. When Mike reports back one day about how much fun Richie had during their graphic novel quest, Eddie swallows down the sting that Richie was enjoying himself with someone other than Eddie and instead focuses on the happiness it brought Richie. If Richie wanted solo hangouts with the other Losers, then that’s what Eddie is going to want as well. So he marches over to Stan and demands that he take Richie out birdwatching with him and Patty. Stan just gives him an appraising stare for a solid thirty seconds before sighing heavily and saying that Eddie owes him 10 packs of bird feed (Eddie eventually negotiates him down to 7).

Everything would be all fine and good if only Eddie could stick to his own rules. But he keeps finding himself inviting Richie to things unconsciously. After a hard day of work, he just wants to have a drink and a vent with the man, and finds the words coming out of his mouth without meaning to. It seems natural to want to spend more time with Richie, even though he knows that’s not a good idea. He justifies it in his head by telling himself he’s acting like a normal friend inviting his pal to a normal hangout, and tries to ignore the fact that he’s pretty sure the more time he spends with Richie the less he thinks he’s going to be able to restrain himself. When he accidentally asks Richie to spend time at his place, he wants to run out of the room and bash his head against the wall for opening himself up to the temptation to chain Richie up in his house and keep him all to himself. Luckily, everything seems to go well and Richie says yes to basically everything Eddie asks, bar jogging. Maybe Richie really does want to be full-on friends with him no matter how weird Eddie has been. If that’s what Richie wants, then that’s what Eddie is going to want as well.

It seems like confirmation of this when Richie invites Eddie to come round to his own flat, because if Richie is making this request on his own behalf, and not just going along with what Eddie pushily demands, then perhaps this is going okay after all. Admittedly, Richie’s place is a total dump, but he also has Dobbin there and Eddie is immediately enamoured with the cat almost as much as he is with his owner. Eddie has gotten a lot better over the years with his maternal-induced hypochondria, but he’d never quite been able to get over his fear of living with a creature that thinks its own saliva is an adequate cleaning agent to actually get a cat. But standing here now with Dob nuzzling affectionally into his hand he sees just how very wrong he’d been. 

He’s so delighted that he almost accidentally tells Richie about his mother and his own cleanliness issues, stopping himself just in time. Perhaps he’s too used to being with the other Losers, all of whom are fine in mentioning their respective childhood traumas to one another during everyday conversation and will support each other in working through them at the drop of a hat. With Richie though, he’s just gotten to the point where the man seems happy to be normal friends with him, he doesn’t want to burn that all down now by dumping all his issues on him. So Eddie makes sure to be careful with what stories he tells Richie about his life, leaving out all of the ones which make him sound like a neurotic weirdo (which is quite a lot of them to be honest). Richie seems to take the opposite tack though because his anecdotes are all thoroughly self-depreciating. They’re very funny, but there’s something odd about his ‘I’m an idiot’ stories that Eddie can’t quite put his finger on. It’s almost like they are more part of some sort of stand-up routine than an actual representation of his friend. While Eddie is sure by now that Richie doesn’t have a boyfriend or anything right now, it is also strange that he never mentions any previous relationships whatsoever. Then again, maybe he just likes to keep that side of his life private, no matter how much Eddie might selfishly want to know everything about him.

It might be a problem with just how addictive all of this, and Eddie is aware how much he’s struggling with the fact that he just wants more and more of Richie. The more he gets to know him, the more time the spend together, the more he thinks about him then all of that desire keeps growing exponentially in some sort of downward addictive spiral like he’s in a heavy handed ‘just say no’ drugs PSA. So far Richie seems to enjoy his time with Eddie, but surely at some point he’s got to hit his limit and get tired of being around him all the time. Worse is just how aware Eddie is of how bad this addiction is for himself – he’s not as co-dependent as Bill and Mike, Stan and Patty or the Bs or anything, but still, wanting to be with your best friend _that_ much of the time was surely beginning to make him reliant on Richie and that was not something he was going to allow, no matter if part of him wanted to. Absolutely not. He wasn’t going to fall into that old trap again.

He started setting alarms on his phone, vibration only, to go off after a set amount of time when he was round Richie’s to remind him that he needed to leave and stay independent.

One evening, approximately 34 minutes before Eddie’s alarm is due to go off, Richie is doing another one of his ridiculous bits as some sort of Blithe Spirit-farm girl thing that doesn’t make any sense but is no less endearing for it, when he alarmingly tumbles onto the sofa and his head lands square in Eddie’s lap and shit. His. Head. Is. Right. Next. To. Eddie’s. PENIS. Okay it’s facing the wrong way, but still, it’s _right there_. But even more alarmingly, is the way Richie’s eyes, overblown behind their glasses, are staring up at Eddie like he’s just been caught elbow-deep in the cookie jar. And yeah, that’s kind of hot in a way, but it’s far more uncomfortable, because Richie looks terrified of him. Eddie realises he hurled his hands into the air as soon as Richie landed, like a cop is side-eyeing him from across the street and he’s desperate to convey that ‘look, my hands were nowhere near the merchandise everything is fine and innocent and fine’. So, he drops his hands back down and one falls square in the middle of Richie’s chest and Richie’s eyes shoot to it as if Eddie is about to khali ma him. Which isn’t the sort of effect Eddie intended. He, much slower this time so as not to alarm the other man any further, lets his hand relax and rest there casually, and as he does so he can see the tension practically drain out of Richie.

From then on, touching becomes a lot more common between them. Richie thankfully doesn’t seem to think of it as Eddie coming onto him, and Eddie is rather surprised at how unsexual he himself finds it most of the time. It’s actually quite nice. And it’s fine right? Two gay guys can be casually tactile without one trying to bone the other can’t they? Just platonic snuggle bros that’s all. Eddie never would have guessed that Richie is actually a touchy-feeley person, but like all things he finds out about him he can’t help but find it endearing. It’s almost as equally surprising to Eddie as to how much he himself is becoming a touchy-feeley guy from all of this, but he’s sure it must be a good thing. After all, now he can exorcise his infatuation gradually, rather than just trying to sleep with Richie and get it all out of his system all at once, this casual touch will surely extinguish the desire slowly and safely. Surely. 

A couple of weeks later, they’re in the morning meeting when Bill brings up an interview with Samir, and that he thinks Richie and Eddie should be the one to handle it. Once again, the someone pulls out the plug on the bottom of Richie’s feet and all of the pigmentation drains out of him, but this time Eddie is a little more confident on what to do and manages to steer him out of the room and back to their office (secretly pleased that’s allowed to do this now). He’s pretty sure from all his ~~shameless stalking~~ responsible research of Richie’s past solo work that he’s never done an interview before, and once Richie confirms this to be the case Eddie sets about prepping and encouraging him. Considering just how articulate Richie can be when he wants to be, he won’t be a disaster or anything, but he understands that popping your press cherry can be pretty intimidating. When they’re sitting there and Samir appears on screen, and Richie’s leg starts vibrating like an Energizer bunny on speed he’s again secretly pleased that he’s the one who gets to lay a calming hand on it.

Yet when Samir asks Richie a question, the nerves disappear as thoroughly as though they’d never existed in the first place and Richie just delivers this whole routine. And frankly…that’s kind of annoying. Eddie is amused by all of the jokes of course and glad that it’s clearly going over well with Samir but the fact that Richie claimed to not know what he was doing and Eddie spent all of that time trying to build his confidence while Richie was actually rehearsing a whole goddamn set in private – it’s frustrating, and Eddie struggles to keep his expression from showing that. It reminds him too much of those kids in school who would make a huge deal after a test of how badly they’d blown it and then act like the A was _such_ a surprise when it invariably arrived. Eddie worked hard to develop his interview skills, and Richie, whether he meant to or not, was rubbing just how much better he was right in Eddie’s face.

When Eddie gets the notification that the article has dropped, he half expects Richie to message him straight away to tell him how badly he must have done. But after 10 minutes of radio silence, Eddie can’t help but give in.

**Eddie:** _You read it yet?_

**Richie:** _No_   
**Richie:** _Too scared_

Eddie makes a face like Dobbin does when you rub him the wrong way. This is exactly the sort of thing he hadn’t wanted in the first place. He was by no means opposed to relying on others to help you through your fears, for sure he’d leaned on the Losers a lot over the years, but he’d also spent a hell of a lot of time by himself working through his own germaphobia. Having to message someone, hintingly asking for them to come over just to fix your own dumb issues rather than taking responsibility for them yourself – that was way too vulnerable for Eddie’s taste.

Then again. Richie was scared.

**Eddie:** _You want me to come over so we can read it together?_

A few hours later, Eddie is in Richie’s arms, prosecco-drunk and dancing around the room together. He’s not entirely sure how he got there, maybe it’s the jubilation of the article, maybe it’s the bubbly on an empty stomach, maybe it’s just Richie Tozier. This man who appeared from nowhere in his life, who is kind, who seems to care for his new friends deeply, who is talented and extraordinarily funny, but who remains a mystery to Eddie no matter how much he wants otherwise. But what does he even want anymore? He said he never wanted dependency, yet here he is round Richie’s flat for the fifth night in a row. He said he just wanted to sleep with him, yet here they are as friends. He said he just wanted to be friends, yet here they are wrapped around one another. He’s tired of not knowing any more. So he decides to ask. 

“Can I kiss you Richie?”

Then they’re kissing, kissing fiercely, and Richie is making all these noises and he’s so goddamn responsive, and Eddie’s isn’t thinking anymore, he’s just doing it and it feels so fucking good and vibration. The vibration from his alarm is shooting up his leg and beating him about the skull. The alarm that reminds him to not spend too much time with Richie, the man he can’t stop thinking about, the guy who just danced with him and let him put his tongue down his throat.

Eddie makes his excuses and leaves in a storm of hormones and confusion. 

***

Eddie doesn’t sleep well that night, too harassed by thoughts of Richie and too busy with complaining about himself to relax. The last thing that he wanted to happen has ended up taking place nevertheless – he can’t sleep for thinking about Richie, can’t work properly for second-guessing what Richie’s opinion would be on every decision that he makes, spends almost all his free time with Richie and is already pondering what to get his cat for Christmas 4 months from now. Just as Eddie let himself become completely and utterly dependent on his mother, he’s made the exact same mistake again. And Richie Tozier couldn’t be more different from Sonia Kaspbrak if he tried so it’s certainly not his fault. No, this is purely Eddie’s failing, his weakness, that is making him incapable of functioning on his own.

When he wakes up early the next morning he makes a decision. Fuck that. Nobody is going to make Eddie Kaspbrak weak, least of all that fucking prick Eddie Kaspbrak. When he looks at his phone and sees a barrage of emails about interviews and articles he snatches the opportunity and immediately snaps into it. He can still do this, he’s a goddamn professional who isn’t slave to anyone, least of all himself. An hour later he’s in the conference room, drawing up schedules, talking on the phone to Buzzfeed, emailing two different magazines and barking orders at a very startled looking Ed and Larry all at the same time. By half-past-nine his blood pressure is spiking, he’s on his third coffee and the whiteboard is a confusing montage of timetables, but he is feeling so fucking good right now. This is why he does this, a love of video games and a ruthless efficiency in getting them made, not some feeble little dependency on a cute boy. Even when the self-same cute boy walks in with a startled look on his face, Eddie greets him the same as everybody else – this is time to get shit done, not drive himself mad questioning his bothersome feelings over and over again.

This fierce motivation does well for most of the day, but then mid-afternoon he looks up from his phone to find himself alone in the room with Richie Tozier staring at him, so sweetly. And like that all those damnable feelings come marching back in. He even thinks of the SpongeBob meme that Richie would use to describe this, he’s so damn hooked on this man. So really, it’s not entirely his choice when he walks over to Richie, slowly to check he’s still okay with this, and kisses him. Thankfully, Ben, the bastard, interrupts them before anything else happens, but the rest of the day is pretty much shot for Eddie in terms of getting anything productive done.

Because god, Richie. This entire fucking time that Eddie has been questioning what exactly it is he wants out of this, he never thought to ask what Richie wanted. Jesus, the spirit of Sonia Kaspbrak is strong in him. After a good hour of scolding himself, Eddie tries to figure out what it is Richie actually wants. He doesn’t want work to know about their liaison or whatever it was that’s for sure, considering he streaked out of the room like his tail was on fire. But what else does he want? This is a man who very clearly rebuffed Eddie’s earlier advance, then seemed happy to be friends, possibly of the platonic cuddling sort, before kissing Eddie _very_ enthusiastically, twice no less and once completely sober, yet at the same time treats his romantic relationships as some sort of government secret.

Fuck. Eddie has just had a very hard and complicated day at work, and now he has to try and get his overtaxed brain to make sense of this mystery. People in relationships really are dumbasses he thinks savagely.

Even after the rest of the workday, the drive home and half an hour of pacing back and forth and glaring at his phone and telepathically demanding that it deliver a message from Richie explaining his motivations in concise detail, Eddie is still no closer to an answer. When the screen lights up with a message, he practically leaps across the room and snatches it up.

**Richie** : _…?_

Oh.

Okay.

That’s what he wanted. Richie just texted to ask him if he was _Down to fuck?_ , but knew Eddie well enough that simply asking _DTF?_ would get him called gross so he sanitised it a bit.

So he wanted to be friends and then they could hook-up. Friends with benefits? Eddie could work with that. The more he thought about it, the more the idea made sense. He liked being friends with Richie, this way he could work out his desires and get back on track without making it awkward afterwards.

He hopped in the shower and performed his patented eight-and-a-half minute cleaning routine, not sure of exactly which way this would happen, and grabbed condoms, lube and wine, left his house, came back for clean sheets, and got in the car. By the time he got there, nervousness was beginning to compete with excitement and horniness. After all, he’d never done this before. Was the wine too romantic? But surely fuck buddies could have a chat and a drink before getting down to the actual sweaty business, couldn’t they?

He was shivering with nerves as he knocked on the door and beginning to second-guess his choice. But then Richie opened the door, and was clearly freshly washed and dressed for the occasion, and god, who knew gangly legs and knobbly knees could be that attractive? And Richie, damp white t-shirt clinging to his chest, sets Eddie’s anxiousness to rest. He makes him laugh, and reassures him that he wasn’t a commanding dickhead at work in the sweetest way. Yeah, this is definitely the right choice. They’re still friends, he’s still funny and supportive, but now Eddie can do with him what he’s wanted from the beginning.

And, Jesus fucking Christ, is getting to do that not the most incredible thing. Richie looks so hot stretched out beneath him like that, average dick and all. He’s very happy to get fucked, in fact he was clearly prepping in the shower before Eddie arrived, and he responds so enthusiastically to everything. Eddie has never been with anyone who seems so willing to relinquish control like that, with most of his past partners having always assumed that Eddie’s height meant that he couldn’t possibly take the reins. Eddie makes sure to keep checking in and everything, but the way Richie seems to _want_ everything, the noises he makes and the way he looks at Eddie like his brain is being fucked out of his skull – well, it sure strokes the hell out of Eddie’s ego that’s for sure. After they’re finished he actually looks so overblown that Eddie is worried he did something wrong, before Richie assures him that “10 out of 10, would play again.”

It’s only then that the problem happens. Here he is, feeling tired and sated, face buried in Richie’s neck, breathing his scent and feeling his soft skin beneath his fingers and Dobbin nuzzled between them purring happily.

Oh. Oh fuck. This is what he wants.

He wants to be like this all the time, to be with Richie, to _be with_ Richie. He loves him. Eddie has thrown away all his independence and all his autonomy, because he was too weak, too needy to do so otherwise.

He can feel the form of his mother looming over him, and she isn’t disgusted the way he always thought she would be if she caught him in bed with another man. No, she’s satisfied, because lying here is proof of everything she ever told him. Her Eddie-bear was to stupid to play games by himself, too incompetent to make them without leeching off others, too unpleasant to not hurt his friends and too goddamn weak to even exist without latching himself onto someone else like some sort of feeble parasite. 

He runs from the room, leaving Richie naked and hurt-looking, because Eddie is too ashamed at the way he already wants to suck Richie in. All the man wanted was a friend with benefits, and here is Eddie demanding more from him, demanding that he be is boyfriend, that he becomes Eddie’s and belong to him. 

Belong to Eddie Kaspbrak, the man who is his mother’s son through and through.

So maybe that’s why Eddie finds himself alone in the office right now, surrounded by post-its and string and the mess of his own making that he’s too pathetic to even clean up by himself.

He sits on the floor, wraps his knees to his chest and cries angry tears.

There’s a sound at the door.

“Eds?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this didn't seem to much like filler, but at least now you know why Eddie has been acting the way he has.


	9. Boss fight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Richie and Eddie finally have the talk they deserve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry everyone, I thought this chapter was going to be shorter and quicker to come out, but apparently not.
> 
> Also, more smut.

Richie stands in the doorway, completely flummoxed by what he’s seeing. Eddie is sat on the floor in the middle of the room, surrounded by a chaos of stationary, knees to his chest and bawling his eyes out. 

It doesn’t make any sense. This is Eddie Kaspbrak for god’s sake. The legendary video game designer, his cool and confident one-sided best friend, a man who can command a whole room of staff like a general in a war room, and can command Richie around like a pharaoh in the sheets. Yet here he is, looking like someone has come along and broken him and destroyed everything around him and made everything so _wrong_ that all he can do now is sit there and cry.

Richie is reminded of the first time he saw his mom after one of her sessions. The bright, sassy woman that he’s relied on his entire life now was pale and wan and her eyes were so drained it almost liked someone had come in and pulled her soul out with a fucking fish hook. She came back though, she always came back to her old self no matter what. But with Eddie – how could Richie pull him back out of where he is right now? Especially when he was probably the one who dropped him down there.

“Eds?” he calls out. The _I’m sorry for causing you this pain and are there any actions I can take to relieve it or should I just leave before I make everything even worse?_ part of the question isn’t said out loud but is clearly implied. Eddie whips his head around, gives Richie a look of horror and goes to hastily stand up, before his knees buckle and he flumps back down and buries his face again. 

Which probably isn’t a great sign. Richie knows exactly what he is worth and has years of childhood experiences under his belt of accidentally making others cry, but he’s not entirely sure this is entirely his fault, even though every fibre of instinct in his brain is screaming that he must be. He hasn’t even seen Eddie since they fucked, and while Richie is certain that he was a terrible lay, this whole having a breakdown in the middle of a deserted office thing that Eddie is doing does seem like a slight overreaction to disappointing sex. He’s replayed the evening in minute detail to himself a thousand times already, jerking off to only half or so of the memories, and while it seems probable that he must have done _something_ wrong to drive Eddie off like, he can’t think what. A familiar sting of guilt hits him now for being so egotistical for thinking that whatever has upset Eddie so badly must be something to do with him, as if he is the only person that is allowed to provide Eddie with emotions. 

None of this helps the fact that Richie is standing uselessly in the door, trying to make this about himself and still holding lingering resentment over the fact that Eddie left his flat after performing the activity that he came over for, an activity that Richie agreed to and very much enjoyed. He’s not helping his friend, he’s just watching him cry like the useless sack of shit that he is. Richie thinks he remembers reading somewhere that people like physical comfort in situations like this, and he knows for a fact that Eddie is a tactile person, so he carefully walks over, crouches down and lays a tentative hand on Eddie’s shoulder. To his surprise, the response is immediate, Eddie turns and wraps his arms around Richie and hides his head in his shoulder. They stay like that for a long time, and Richie’s ankles begin to twinge with the strain of staying in this position, but there’s something about the feeling of Eddie clinging to him like he’s a life raft in a shark tank, the wetness in his shoulder from Eddie’s tears and the way that the shorter man seems to loosen ever so slightly as Richie rubs his back, like every stroke is smoothing a wrinkle out. It seems absurd after all the casual touches they’ve exchanged, the kisses and the fact that Eddie was very recently both naked and inside of him – but somehow this almost feels like the most intimate thing they’ve done. It feels like he’s helping Eddie.

After a while though, the stiffness returns to Eddie’s back and Richie recognises that tension, the same sort that appeared just before Eddie made his abrupt exit the previous two nights. He extracts himself slowly but firmly from Richie’s arms, wipes his eyes, clears his throat and says in a deep voice “I’m sorry Richie. That was unprofessional of me. Don’t worry, I’ll get back to work now.” He refuses eye contact.

In that moment Richie is sure, he knows that Eddie isn’t okay. He’s lying, and he’s not going to just get back on it with it and he needs help. Richie certainly isn’t sure that he’s the person who can provide that help, but that doesn’t matter right now. His offer of help might be rebuffed, Eddie might say that his problems are not going to be solved by some worthless scrub, but that’s not important. Eddie needs help, so Richie is going to offer it no matter what because Eddie deserves it. “Eds, if you want to talk about anything at all then you can. With me. I mean” he says in the most confident voice he can muster.

Eddie stares at him, and Richie thinks that’s temptation he can see there.

“No, it’s fine” Eddie says in a brusque voice. “There just my dumb issues, nothing special.”

“Issues aren’t dumb,” Richie pushes again. “Issues make you cool.” He smiles with hesitant enthusiasm.

This earns him a small smile in return. Eddie rocks back on his heels slightly and bites his lip. “It’s just that my mom is here and…” he says in a rush before cutting himself off.

“Wait she’s out of the nursing home?”

“No, she’s not really here, she’s actually there but I just…ugh this is so dumb. But sometimes I feel like she’s here with me, like I even see her out of the corner of my eye, which I know is stupid, but whatever, I told you it was dumb and you asked about it anyway, so your problem. It’s nothing really, just an imaginary woman right? It’s just the fact that it’s all the damn time.” Eddie gasps for breath and plunges straight on. “Like I did everything I can to cut her out of my life, I keep her at some sort or Mr Fantastic-level of arm length, but it doesn’t matter because my idiot self just packages her up and hauls her around in the back wherever I go. Guess you probably think I’m a clean freak right, total germaphobe? I’m not, I’m really not anymore, at least not like when I was a kid. I still know the stats and everything, like what will actually get you sick, but that’s not what scares me. What scares me is that if I don’t clean something properly my mom will appear and shout at me. Like how fucking pathetic is that? It’s not dirt or disease or fucking pestilence that scares me, it’s the idea of my mother astrally projecting from the nursing home and crying and wailing in front of me, like she’s still going to be able to guilt-trip me and send me to my room. I’m a grown-ass man – don’t make a crack about my height or I swear to god I’ll smack you – and I’m still terrified of a mom that I’m basically imagining at this point. Pathetic.” 

Eddie has said all of this in one intense, long-winded expulsion, and as pained as his mouth had sounded, it looked to Richie like the speech had done Eddie some good, like a little of the pain inside of him had been ejected verbally from his system. But what he was saying still hurt Richie. How could Eddie think of himself as pathetic? Richie was an expert in the subject of patheticness and could bring all of his qualified opinion to say that the idea of Eddie being pathetic was patently absurd.

He grabs Eddie’s hand, causing him to look up from the floor he’s been staring at bitterly and look Richie in the eye. 

“You’re not pathetic. At all. And while I guess I can’t relate to having a mother like yours, because mine was always – is always – awesome, I think she wants to meet you actually, we could arrange it maybe if you’d like, though I don’t know why you would want to –“ Eddie gives him an incredulous look, Richie coughs and tries to get back on track. “Anyway. You’re not the only person who sees childhood shittyness around you. I do, like all the goddamn time.”

Eddie makes a slight scoffing sound at this and turns away, but Richie squeezes his hand desperately to bring it back. “No really” he says earnestly. “The first time I worked with Stan it was all I could do to not run from the room because he kind of looked like this dickdouche I knew in middle school. Every time I looked over I’d see the kid’s smug looking face staring back at me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was going to steal from me. I don’t know what poor Stan thought I was doing, I’m sure I looked like a right freak to him.”

“You didn’t” Eddie says gently. “Though he did tell me you thought he smelled. He used Patty’s deodorant for the next week to see if it helped.”

They both chuckle at that, Richie dryly and Eddie wetly. Eddie is smiling and Richie’s heart tingles at the knowledge that his own stupidity had such a positive outcome. But it’s only momentary, before a more serious look comes slamming down again on Eddie’s face.

“Yeah but you didn’t run away did you?” Eddie asks darkly.

“Well, no, but that’s probably only because you and the others –“

Eddie waves his hand dismissively. “You didn’t let your hang ups control you. I think that’s something I’ve done my whole life, and I’m only just realising. My mom took so much control away from me when I was young, I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades doing everything I can to take as much control as I possibly could, and I told myself over and over that that was the way of getting over her and her bullshit, to finally prove ‘look Ma, look at me, I can do it all by myself.’ Never noticed that I was basically becoming her.”

“What?” Richie exclaims. “No, that’s bullshit. I admit I’ve never met your mum, but I saw that photo of her you have in the kitchen, and I really doubt she looks as hot as you do with no clothes on.”

No laugh this time. Instead Eddie carries on. “The difference is you didn’t run away did you? Whatever your shit is, and I’m not asking or anything, I get it you like to keep that stuff private,” Richie doesn’t know what he’s talking about but Eddie pays this no heed. “You managed to handle it. I just gobbled up all the crap I was fed without even noticing. I didn’t tell myself, let alone you.”

“Is this about you leaving after, um, you know? The er, fornication?” Richie asks clumsily, struggling to keep up. “Because I didn’t mean to make you think that you couldn’t talk afterwards. Sorry. I’m always happy to talk, like if that’s something you want. Like now.”

“It’s not just that!” Eddie explodes and Richie flinches, which only makes Eddie looks even angrier and Richie can’t believe just how much worse he is making this. 

“I’ve been doing this to you since the beginning!” Eddie is on his feet now and striding up and down the office, weaving around the piles of paper without looking at them. Or Richie. “I dragged you to that night out and forced you into an initiation, just so I could try and fuck you! When that went badly, I didn’t apologise, I basically demanded that you be my friend. I tricked you into hanging out with the other Losers so that I could see you smile when you’d tell me about it afterwards. I leeched all of your time away until you couldn’t get away from me inside work or out of it. I attack you one night and just assume that you’re okay with that. You never wanted any of that! And I fucking fall for you, when I know that’s the goddamn last thing that you want, but that doesn’t fucking stop me!”

By the end Eddie is breathing heavily and staring pointedly at the wall.

Richie is still sat on the floor, his jaw dropped. Is that what Eddie had been doing? Eddie fell…for Richie? Everything about his life since the joined the Clubhouse Collective has been absurd, but this has got to be the most ridiculous thing that he’s ever heard. And yet…that does sort of explain Eddie’s behaviour. He watched a lot of Poirot murder mysteries with Maggie when he was a kid and this nonsense-sounding claim fits the pattern. Improbable as hell, but it fits. But even while his little grey cells are buzzing away, comes the guilt. Without meaning to, he caused Eddie so much pain. Richie doesn’t know what he did to manipulate Eddie into falling for him, but somehow he has, and in doing so he’s made Eddie feel like the guilty one, not the victim in all of this.

“So you, like wanted me?” Richie asks, wary of asking a question that sounds this stupid. “All of that, they weren’t just pity gestures or something?”

“What? Of course, I wanted you, haven’t you been listening?” Eddie snaps, looking at Richie like he’s a blithering idiot.

“And I wanted it” Richie says promptly.

The wind drops out of Eddie’s sails and for the first time since he started talking he hesitates. He stares cautiously at Richie. “As in…you wanted to fuck?”

Richie blushes and swallows heavily before carrying on. This might be the most mortifying thing he’s ever done in his life, but it seems to be making Eddie less upset with himself. “As in I wanted all of it.”

Eddie opens his mouth again but Richie cuts him off. “When you started working with me and helping me despite all my dumb mistakes, I wanted that. I wanted to get drunk with you. I never even realised joining the Losers Club was an option to want, but I did want it. I like hanging out with you and being friends with you. And everything you did to me in no-clothing mode, I wanted that so much. Everything you’ve ever given me I wanted. I’ll take whatever you’re offering.”

Eddie seems to be struggling to process what Richie just told him, like someone just disconnected his hard drive. Richie hopes that this is better than Eddie beating himself up when he did nothing wrong, but the feeling that this confession was a mistake is still creeping up his spine. The longer Eddie opens and shuts his mouth wordlessly, the stronger the urge to get up and scramble out of the room grows. Richie’s eyes are beginning to prickle when Eddie finally speaks.

“I thought you wanted a friend with benefits kind of deal?”

“When did I tell you that?” Richie asks. “I know I talk a lot, and I’m really sorry if I said something that made you think-“

“You didn’t come back with me that first night out. You waited until we were friends before you did anything physical.”

“Wait…you wanted to fuck that night?” Richie asks, aware his voice sounds like he’s asking if Eddie just invented faster-than-light travel.

“Um yeah” Eddie replies, with that same incredulous tone he uses when someone around has just said something mind-numbingly obvious and he’s holding back the urge to throw something at them. “And then you sent that ‘dot dot dot question mark’ message” he adds.

“Yes…?” Richie answers, not sure what it is he’s actually answering.

“As in you asked me if I’m down to fuck?”

“Is that what that means?” Richie yelps in dismay. Eddie huffs dismissively and Richie tries to justify himself. “Look at me, do I look the kind of guy who knows what any text message that doesn’t contain a meme means?”

The corners of Eddie’s mouth twitch, but he still looks determined to shout at himself. “But you never talk about relationships or anything. Never mentioned a partner or anything. For a while I thought – wait, you don’t actually have a secret boyfriend do you?”

“No.” _Duh._

“Yeah, so I assumed the reason you were so quiet about it was that you took your serious relationships privately and didn’t want to just jump into something super serious with that weirdly high-strung guy at the office, and…”

Again, Richie finds this somewhat painful and he doesn’t really know why Eddie is doing this. Is he trying to humiliate Richie to make him feel better about himself? A control thing? Or maybe it’s like a kink, he wants to guide the nubile young virgin through his first ever relationship? Richie is two months younger than Eddie after all, it’s a possibility. And it’s not as if Eddie would ever be able to find someone shorter than him.

“I’ve never had a boyfriend” Richie blurts out, interrupting Eddie. Might as well get it over with, whatever it is.

“Oh.” Eddie hesitates, before gaining a second wind. “Exactly. You like to keep it casual, fuck buddies right, and I missed that because I’m an idiot –“

“I’ve never had a friend before. With benefits.”

“….Hook ups?”

Richie shakes his head.

“Okay, I’m really confused then.”

So is Richie. This seems like a very weird kink.

The colour drains from Eddie’s face. “Wait, shit – was that your first time?”

Richie nods cautiously, not sure if this enhancing or ruining or the thing.

“Fuck!” Eddie shouts. He runs his hand through his hair and turns away to kick the desk a few times. “I can’t believe I did that. I’m such a – fucking – idiot!” He punctuates his words with a kick and a sound that is almost a sob.

“Ouch. Way to kick a virgin while he’s down.” Richie says trying to make light of Eddie reaction even though his own throat is growing heavy. “Well, not virgin anymore obviously, but-“

“Oh, god, no no no” Eddie says in a rush. He dashes over, crouches down by Richie with an embarrassed look on his face. He reaches out to touch Richie, but then stops, seemingly thinking better of it. “No, there’s nothing wrong with it, of course there isn’t, I should have asked, I just never thought…” he looks at Richie piteously. “I should have been so domineering with you if it was your first time. And I should have asked if you wanted to top, I mean you probably would have done – do you even like bottoming? Shit, how would you have even known? God I’m so sorry”

Richie’s hand darts out and grabs Eddie’s. He flinches. “Please don’t be sorry” Richie says softly. He rubs his thumb along the back of Eddie’s hand and the other man seems to relax by a millimetre. “I mean I know I don’t exactly have a vast library of experience or anything, but it was incredible. I mean it. 10 out of 10, would smash again.”

This time Richie does earn himself a laugh, and a small playful shove to boot. “You’re gross” Eddie chides. “But, seriously, you’re okay with it?”

“More than okay. You worked me over better than you do in _Mortal Kombat_ and you have my thorough endorsement to do it again any time. If you want.”

Eddie giggles slightly and laces his fingers through Richie’s. “Well, if it helps you get experience” he teases and Richie chuckles.

“I do need more SEXP level up. Get it?”

“Yes Richie, sex-XP I get it” Eddie rolls his eyes. “I wouldn’t have guessed. You kiss pretty well you know.”

“Really?” Richie inquiries with a smirk, feeling incredibly emboldened. He leans forwards and puckers his lips and starts making a gross sucky sound that elicits a laugh. “Well, I am a fast learner.”

Eddie stops laughing. “You’re telling me I was your first kiss as well?!? Oh shit…” he rocks back and begins to breathe heavily again.

Richie catches his cheek in his hand, and brings his face back around. He goes into kiss him, but then pauses, not sure if he should do such a thing when Eddie hasn’t asked. He settles for pressing his forehead against Eddie’s softly, and stroking his thumb down his cheek. “I told you, it’s fine. I’m very happy with you popping my smooching cherry.”

Eddie’s breathing just continues to hitch faster though. His eyes duck down and stare at Richie’s chin, but he doesn’t disconnect their foreheads. “I made you think you like me just because I was the one who took your virginity. That’s not a good foundation for an infatuation. I’m not even that great in bed, I’ve slept with people who were better than me. And from the way Bill tells it when he’s had too much sangria, Mike is an incredible dom top when they’re in the mood, if that’s what you like, but I doubt Bill would share –“

“I’m not some dumbstruck teenager Eds. I mean dumb yes, teenager no, and I don’t really know what ‘struck’ means so that’s a maybe. It was pretty earth-shattering sure, but I didn’t get, like, feelings for you _because_ of it.” Eddie cringes a little but Richie carries on before he can say anything. “I fell in lo- like with you long before you put your tongue in me. In either orifice.”

Eddie gigglesnorts and Richie finally feels the muscles in his neck uncoil for the first time since Eddie walked out and left him lying there on the bed. 

“Could I, um, maybe hug you Eds?” he inquires awkwardly, pretty sure this isn’t too big an ask under the circumstances.

“I had my dick in you a few hours ago, I think this will be acceptable” Eddie responds, just about managing to keep his expression deadpan.

“Yeah well, we never actually hugged before. Not properly anyway.” As much as Richie loves their fist bumps, and occasional bro hugs, he can’t help but want for something more lingering.

“Jesus, we kind of did this the wrong way round didn’t we? Fuck, I screwed up so bad.”

“Hey, I should have probably said something too. It was, just, well you know.” Richie says, his voice swiftly changing from soothing to wobbly as he tries to find a way to assure Eddie that everything was actually Richie’s fault, without also making him realise just how useless a person Eddie has apparently fallen for. The words die in Richie’s mouth though as soon as Eddie wraps his arms around his neck and brings him in close, and all that Richie manages to verbalise is a surprised little hum. Eddie arms feel so softly sure around him, and his chin hooks so affectionally over his shoulder, that even as his back begins to twinge from leaning awkwardly over his crossed legs he can’t move away from the warmth and their synchronised breaths. 

“You know,” Eddie says quietly without moving from his position. “The idea of like, actually _being with someone_ always sounded like the worst idea to me. Giving up independence like that. Having to spend all your time with that person, be forced to think about them constantly, make them your root of emotional stability, all of it.” A chill appears in Richie’s stomach, because all of this sounds an awful lot like what he’s conned Eddie into doing. “But now that I’ve done that with you,” Eddie continues, “I realise just how much I like it. This is what I want. For real. Obviously, you don’t have to feel the same or anything, but if you’re interested I’d like to be with you. Properly. Like, boyfriends or whatever.”

Eddie withdraws from the hug to examine Richie’s reaction. His tone is both sincere and casual, his face entirely calm, and his hands are picking at a loose fingernail.

Richie isn’t entirely sure why he’s being asked. How can he possibly be considered to be someone able to give an informed opinion on a romantic relationship? This would be like asking Dobbin if he would like to date a whale shark, something so utterly and bizarre and unachievable as to be effectively irrelevant. But here it is, the opportunity has been plonked right into his lap. His first instinct is to pick it up and hurl it away and run to the other side of the room from this terrifying prospect that is surely so much more than he can possibly handle. But then Richie thinks about how certain he had been that he couldn’t do the job, that the Clubhouse Collective couldn’t possibly want to hire him. Then they did. At how he was certain the Loser’s wouldn’t really like hanging out with him. Then they called him one of their own. How Eddie would never want to kiss someone like him. Then he fucked him within an inch of his life.

Maybe Richie can do this.

“Sure,” he says with a smile. “That would be great.”

Eddie looks at him, unsure. Richie widens his grin a little more. “That would be wonderful dear” he says in a British accent. “Just spiffing. Absolutely top hole. A right jolly time. Sounds like a good sticky wicket all around, doesn’t it chum?”

Eddie slaps a hand over his mouth and smirks. “I regret it already” he says, before pulling his hand away and kissing him.

This time though, it’s Richie who takes control of the kiss. He wraps his hand around the back of Eddie’s head and threads his fingers through his hair, he bites Eddie’s lower lip gently, and when his mouth opens in a gasp he pushes his tongue and licks into his mouth. He’s hungry, but the more firmly he kisses the more Eddie responds and a rush of blood surges to Richie’s head. He’s kissing Eddie Kaspbrak, who’s just told him that he wants Richie, not just for sex, not just as a friend but to be with Richie and the sense of victory is incredibly encompassing. As their kissing heats up, Richie places his other hand on Eddie’s chest and pushes only gently, but Eddie complies immediately, sinking down to the floor and bringing Richie down with him by their lips, who then crawls on top of the smaller man and continues to kiss him passionately. This feels like one of the biggest victories in Richie’s life, he’s gained Eddie’s affection and trust and he wants to revel in that victory, to dive into it and claim the spoils. When Eddie lets out this slight whimpering sound that Richie has never heard before, he can practically see the achievement notification pop up.

Their making out grows more and more heated, and when Richie shifts his hips slightly he feels Eddie’s hardness grind against his own that is straining in his jeans, and they both break off from kissing to let out a groan at the feeling. Richie swallows heavily, and says “Do you think this has ever happened in the office before?”

Eddie’s flushed face turns and looks at the scattered paper they’re currently lying on top of, and his face crinkles, seemingly only just cognizant that they were a few seconds away from humping one another in the workplace. “Oh, yeah, guess not” he says dazedly.

“That doesn’t mean we have to stop if you don’t want to” Richie says cautiously.

“Um…” Eddie hesitates clearly torn. “No, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to work in this room again without popping a boner if anything else happens. Come on, we’re going to mine.”

“To carry on?”

“What do you think dumbass? Now move.”

It’s hard to say anything to each other on the bus, Richie doesn’t think either of them really want to talk about their feelings somewhere so public, and it’s not really the sort of place he can vocalise any of the incredibly filthy thoughts that are streaming through his mind right now. Judging by the jacket Eddie keeps over his lap for the entire ride he’s in the same situation, so Richie has to content himself with focusing on the throbbing energy coming that comes from the heat of Eddie’s thigh pressed again his own. As soon as they step off the bus and start the short walk to Eddie’s house, Eddie takes advantage of the privacy to shoot off a series of questions to Richie to check if he wants to top this time because he bottomed last time, if he’s interested in topping, if he feels like he has enough choice this time because Eddie didn’t really give him one last time, if he knows that Eddie is very open to trying whatever if Richie is interested, but that all Richie has to do is say if he doesn’t like something and that he knows that right? All Richie manages to respond with is a nod and a strangled ‘uh-uh’, his throat dry and his pants tightening uncomfortably. 

When they arrive, Eddie leads Richie into his bedroom and tells him to wait there while he disappears into the bathroom. Richie is torn between the urge to look around the room – he’s never been in here before and he wants to check out the decorations –or making preparations for whatever is going to happen next. Should he undress, or is that too presumptive? He dumps his jacket on top of a chest of drawers and kicks off his shoes, before folding the jacket neatly and lining up the shoes in the corner, as it looks politer. Maybe he should take his socks off? Like, that’s an article of clothing that wouldn’t really get an opportunity to be stripped off if they decide to undress one another, it didn’t happen last time, and maybe Eddie will want him fully naked this time. And it’s not too forward if not is it? After a few moments internal debate he does take them off, and rolls them up and tucks them into his shoes. Wow, Eddie’s carpet is soft. Wait why is he thinking about the flooring right now? Actually was are you supposed to think about pre-sex? Do you plan your moveset or something? Last time the sex just kind of happened, at least from Richie’s perspective, but clearly Eddie had more of a gameplan. Maybe Richie should come up with some sort of sex strategy, but where do you even begin with such a thing?

His semi-panicked musings are interrupted by Eddie, exactly eight and a half minutes since he went into the bathroom, entering the room. Completely fucking naked.

Richie stops breathing for several seconds.

He never really got a chance to look at Eddie in full previously, too caught up in the overwhelmingness of everything that was happening, but this time he takes the opportunity to drink it all in. Eddie’s face is still the same, but his hair is slightly damp from the shower and a drop of water is hanging carelessly from one strand, and there’s something incredibly alluring about the fact that Richie can now see that the blush on his cheeks spreads down his neck onto his chest. That chest is even broader than it looked behind those tight polo shirts he’s so fond of, and Jesus are those abs? Eddie makes video games, he shouldn’t have those! Those legs as well, with their toned calves and thighs that make Richie want to drop to his knees and take a bite out of them. Shit, maybe there is something to this jogging malarkey that Eddie talks about. Richie’s eyes flick back to Eddie’s cock, half-hard and surrounded by a neatly trimmed nest of hair. It’s not especially long, but is thick and solid and makes Richie remember how good it made him feel last time and hopes desperately that he can make Eddie feel an ounce of the pleasure that he gave him. 

“Holy mother of Beelzebub herself, looks at you Eds, Jesus you look fucking incredible” Richie gasps out, striding over and placing his hands gently on Eddie shoulders, which are as firm and smoothed as a Greek status someone had run a buffer over. 

“Um, you remember me being naked before right?” Eddie asks, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

“Yeah, but then you were too busy fucking the neurons out of my head for me to actually be able to like process visual data, but this Eds, this is some 4k shit right here. You’re like some sort of everlasting gobstopper I want to keep in my mouth for fucking ever.” Richie has little idea what he’s really saying at this point, but he just desperately wants to praise everything he can see right now because A. Eddie looks outstanding and deserves to know it and B. Eddie just told him some of the best things that Richie has ever heard and Richie needs to pay him back anyway he can. 

Richie has led Eddie to the bed by his shoulders, then he flips his hands to Eddie’s underarms and hoists him onto the bed (quickly, so Eddie doesn’t spot the tremble in his arms as he does so), causing Eddie to let out a quiet ooph as he lands on the soft bedspread, and glance around him with wide eyes as if he’s not entirely sure how he got here. Richie hesitates for a moment and asks “Wait, this is okay isn’t it?”

Eddie smirks back. “Be my guest.”

Richie has every intention on taking him up on that offer, again he pushes Eddie so he’s lying down before climbing on top of him and slotting their mouths together and pushing down into him more frantically than before. There’s something a little weird about Richie still being dressed while Eddie squirms naked underneath him, but what exactly is he supposed to do about that? He could pull his t-shirt off but that would interrupt him from the important tasks of kissing Eddie’s mouth and sucking on his tongue. Maybe, just maybe, he could pause the grinding long enough to lose the harsh denim of his jeans, but how would that even work in this position? He could undo his belt one handed, but then what – just wiggle his legs until his pants slid down, flipping them up and down like a mermaid? The thought made Richie laugh into the kiss.

“What?” Eddie asks, detaching his mouth for just a second. Richie doesn’t answer though, much too distracted by the site of Eddie’s neck stretched out and glowing. He remembers just how good it felt when Eddie sucked on his neck, and he’s determined to try and replicate that as best he can. He launches his mouth down and begins kissing and licking the skin there, and Eddie let’s out this full-body shudder. Richie’s read about this, he watched a tutorial once, and he’s pretty sure on the theory of biting down gently but firmly, creating a vacuum and sucking, but it’s really hard to focus when Eddie is making these choking sounds that Richie can _feel_ vibrating in his neck. Richie releases his teeth and gives a couple of gentle laps with his tongue, before pulling back and sure enough – there is a hickey just beginning to blossom on the tan of Eddie’s skin and Richie feels proud. Eddie said he wanted to be with Richie and there is the proof right there, etched on the flesh in front of him.

Feeling hungrier than he ever has before, Richie continues to kiss and lick down Eddie’s torso, taking quick little breaks from sucking on his nipples to murmur into the skin. “Going to take good care of you Eds, you deserve to feel so fucking good and I’m going to make you feel incredible. You taste so good. Like, like someone seasoned you to perfection, gave you a real good fucking basting and then slow-roasted your abs, I think you’re going to melt right in my fucking mouth.” 

Eddie is just as noisy, laughter mixed with gasps. “I didn’t marinate myself in the shower Richie!”

“You sure babe? Because this is some gourmet shit right here” Richie responds, swiping his tongue down Eddie’s navel.

“I don’t remember you talking this much last time.”

“Yeah but that was before your dick unlocked level 2. I’ve upgraded my mouth baby.”

As Richie leaves a series of tender bites on Eddie’s hip he’s incredible aware of the cock sitting and twitching just a few centimetres away. He can feel his hair brushing it as he works, he can smell the pre-come dripping and collecting on Eddie’s belly – and Jesus whoever would have guessed that could smell that delicious – and he could feel the heat just radiating off it. He kind of thinks that maybe he should check first or give some sort of warning, but he’s pretty sure the breathy sounds Eddie is making are giving him a clear go ahead, so he shifts over slightly and licks a quick swipe up the full length of Eddie’s cock, eliciting a groan from the shorter man. So Richie does it again, and again, each stripe slower than the last and Eddie’s thighs start to tremble like they’re a motel bed that Richie has just fed a quarter into. Desperately eager, he wraps his lips around the crown and the head-spinning burst of flavour makes him groan.

“God Eds, you’re so fucking hot. I’m going to give you exactly what you want. Going to suck you soul out through your dick like it’s a crazy straw.” Eddie makes a weird low-pitched sound, like someone has punched a moan out of him mid-laugh. “You’re ridiculous” he says.

“More like ri-DICK-ulous” Richie responds with raised eyebrows.

“Terrible” Eddie says, failing to hide his smile. 

Richie is actually pretty surprised by how much it turns out he likes rambling during sex, but he does understand his new-found dirty motormouth right now, because he’s desperately trying to work through his nerves. There’s something about the sight of Eddie’s body and the urge to do everything in his power to make it feel good that has so far shoved his jitters off the bed, but this – actually having to suck Eddie off – that makes him incredibly nervous. Everything else has been pretty instinctive, but there’s like skill and technique in this isn’t there? What if he fucks it up? Bloody hell, they surely called him Bucky Bever in school for a reason didn’t they? But then he looks up the length of Eddie’s heaving chest to where his eyes are gazing down at Richie with his mouth at the end of his cock and he can see _trust_ there. It’s not even that Eddie is just horny right now, eager for a mouth to service him but that he wants Richie Tozier to be here, doing that to him. So he does.

He tightens the seal of his lips and sinks down, and Eddie stops breathing and bucks his hips up off the mattress. All that intimidation slides away as Richie gets to work, because there’s so much he wants to try. He moves his head up and down, sliding from the very tip to halfway down, his jaw stretched wide, he hollows his cheeks and sucks hard, he flicks his tongue underneath and around and pulls back to suckle on the head. The feel of the weight in his mouth, the flavour leaking onto his tongue, the gentle slide and occasional tugs of Eddie’s fingers in his hair and the sound of Eddie’s repeated “Richie, oh fuck, Richie” chanting in his ears – Richie’s brain is spiralling dizzily down the wormhole. Intent on making Eddie know just how much he cares about him, he takes a big gulp of air and sinks down and down, determined to bury his nose in the hair at the base. Eddie’s cock breaches the back of his mouth and his throat wraps around it and this is a lot just sink down and oh fuck he can’t breathe, he gags and Eddie’s hand is there pulling him back up and he coughs and splutters and casts his eyes down ashamed of his failure. 

“Jesus, Richie are you okay?”

Richie nods miserably. “I’m sorry Eddie, I thought I could..” he gestures embarrassedly. “I just wanted to-“

He’s interrupted by Eddie kissing him deeply and Richie whimpers in surprise.

“You don’t have to deepthroat me you know” Eddie says softly. “You did great.”

“Really?” Riche asks shyly.

“So fucking great” Eddie whispers into his ear, before biting it and eliciting a shudder from Richie. “If you’d gone on much longer this all would have been over way too quickly. Also I think we should move onto the next item on our agenda.”

“Which is?” Richie enquires quietly from he’s buried himself in Eddie’s neck.

“You fucking me” Eddie says bluntly and Richie makes a loud choking sound. “If you’re still up for it.”

“Oh I am so UP for it”

Eddie leans over, open the drawer on his bedside table, fishes around for a moment and pulls out a tube of lube. He uncaps it and begins to squeeze it onto his fingers before Richie snatches it out of his hand.

“Um, sorry, I just..” Richie says in response to Eddie’s startled look. “I really wanted to do that.”

A tiny flash of surprise crossed Eddie’s face, before he kisses Richie on the cheek and flops back onto the sheets. “I’d love that” he says, spreading his legs.

Richie bites his lip, Eddie’s entrance is right there so obscenely on view. It’s not like he hasn’t seen digital assholes before of course, but never one in real life, excluding that time with the mirror when he tried to properly examine his own and Dobbin wouldn’t stop looking at him like he was an embarrassment. He never would have guessed that they could be pretty though, but that’s what Eddie’s is – gorgeous. He squirts a generous amount of lube onto his index finger and starts working it around Richie’s rim, slowly and carefully. He can feel Eddie’s gaze boring into the top of his skull, but ignores it and focuses on steadily teasing and watching Eddie’s asshole begin to flutter in anticipation. When Eddie starts wiggling his butt impatiently, Richie just runs his nails down Eddie’s inner thigh, tracing closely along his taint and under his balls. 

“Just go in already” Eddie grumbles.

“As you wish” Richie smirks and pushes his finger in, slowly but firmly and right down to the knuckle. Eddie tries and fails to hide to his moan behind his hand. Richie starts working his finger, just small incremental movements at first, a teasing fuck, a preview of things to come, before bringing it back to the rim and plunging its full length into him, and Eddie’s toes curl and his hands clutch at the sheets.

“Holy shit, your fingers are long. Ohh, god, I mean I’d been thinking about them before, but I never though they could feel quite this – oh fuck” Eddie gasps out.

“Yeah baby. They don’t call me Slenderman for nothing you know.”

“Fucking hell Richie, don’t call yourself that while you’re finger-fucking me, what the hell is – OH FUCK!” Eddie’s complaint his cut off by a wail, a full-on wail, as Richie curls his finger and rubs his prostate fiercely. He massages it mercilessly, till Eddie is just whispering a series of expletives under his breath, before he gives him a break and pulls his finger out. He adds more lube, and pushes two in this time just before Eddie can fully relax. 

Richie gets to work then, scissoring and stretching, before switching back to fucking his fingers into Eddie’s warm hole, and then back to grinding on his prostate. He settles himself so he’s lying down between Eddie’s legs, partially so he can nip on Eddie’s thighs as he works, partially so he can grind his own aching hardness against the bed and give it some relief that he’s been crying out for, but also so he can watch Eddie’s ass stretch and flutter around his fingers as fucks it relentlessly. Richie’s eyes are torn between this, and flicking up past Eddie’s cock twitching with need and where his heaving torso glistens with sweat and pre-come, to where Eddie’s face grows red and lets loose the most delicious-sounding moans and his own eyes alternate between locking with Richie’s and slamming shut in ecstasy. 

Richie is flush with pride. He knows he’s pretty good with his fingers, countless hours of practice both with controllers and his own ass to thank for that, but the evidence right there in front of him, groaning and writhing on the sheets, makes his heart sing. Just as when the Losers Club called him one of their own for the first time, and when Samir’s article was posted, there is proof positive that Richie Tozier is doing something right in his life for a change. He’s giving Eddie pleasure, from the looks of it he’s making him feel just as good as when Eddie fucked him, and that has gotten him harder than he ever thinks he’s been before. Every sigh, every spasm, every spurt of pre-come from Eddie cock and clench around Richie’s fingers tell him that he’s doing good.

“Okay, okay, stop, I’m close” Eddie wheezes out. Richie drags his fingers along his prostate, slowly and firmly one last time and Eddie swears under his breath.

“Fucking hell Tozier, are you trying to make this be over already? Stop trying to warp pipe to the end.” Eddie catches Richie opening his mouth and before he can speak, interrupts him. “Yeah, yeah you’d love to warp my pipe. I know you Richie.”

The idea of someone knowing him, and what a dud of a person that he is, has always seemed terrifying before, but the way Eddie says it, pulling off his clothes and asking him “Now can you please fuck me. If you still want to?” as he does so, that makes him feel like Eddie is stripping him naked and raw in every way. For some reason, Eddie likes what he sees.

The actual prospect of fucking Eddie meanwhile, judging by the hardness of his cock that hits his belly with an audible thwack when Eddie hastily tugs his pants off and also by the shiver that runs up his spine, is both incredibly arousing and immensely intimidating. This isn’t like fingers, Richie’s only experience with dicks in asses is when Eddie fucked him and he’s not sure he contributed much to the effort there. Richie was always terrible at rhythm action games and now he needs to _PaRappa the Rapper_ the hell out of the most incredible person he’s met. He’s relieved that Eddie puts the condom on for him, presumably to spare him the embarrassment, but the way he does it – one-handed, with his other arm wrapped around Richie’s shoulders to tug him down into a deep kiss – has him leaking into the condom already.

Eddie flips back onto his back and Richie takes his place between his legs again, leant over Eddie and resting on one hand while the other guides his cock to Eddie’s entrance. They stare into one another eyes for a few moments while Eddie cards his hand through his hair soothingly. Nothing is said, but Eddie gives a slight nod, Richie takes a deep breath and begins pushing in. Eddie’s breath hitches and he tips his head back, but his hands splay themselves over Richie’s back and encourage him to carry on sliding in. Richie does so, achingly slow, and nervously watching Eddie’s face for any sign of the pain being too much or sign that he’s doing it wrong. It’s only when he bottoms out and Eddie lets out a contented hum that he actually pays attention to what he’s feeling. Holy shit, Eddie feels incredible, he’s so warm and tight, and Richie can feel the walls hugging his cock move and clench around him…he had no idea a dick could actually feel this fucking good.

“Plenty massive enough…” Eddie mutters with a smirk, and Richie grins and kisses him on the forehead, then the tip of the nose and then the mouth, dancing his tongue around while waiting for Eddie to get used to the feeling and relax. When Eddie tells him, “Okay you can move now slowpoke” Richie strokes his cheek and pulls his hips back leisurely, savouring every sensation as he does so, the way Eddie’s tunnel grips and sucks at him as he withdraws like he doesn’t want Richie’s cock to leave, and then the way it pushes back against him when he shoves back in, driving the breath out of Eddie’s lungs and into his own mouth when does so. 

Eddie wraps his legs around Richie’s waist and tugs on his hair. “Harder. Faster please. Oh fuck.”

Richie obliges and picks up the pace, driving harder and faster into the other man. “God, Eddie you feel so fucking good. You’re so tight, I want to do this all day, fuck you deep, want to make you feel so fucking good, want to make you cry with it, make you scream, I wanna…” he rambles on and on, not sure of what he’s saying, just knowing that he needs to vocalise something, anything that will tell Eddie what he’s feeling right now. He wants to show Eddie how much he cares for him, with his voice and with his body.

Eddie matches him word for word. “God, Richie, you’re so fucking good. Oh. Fuuuck, yes god, there, just there, oh shit” he groans and sighs, keens loudly and whispers encouragements into Richie’s ear. 

Richie thinks, that as amazing as Eddie’s body, soft and pliant beneath him, feels, and as arousing as the filthy things he’s saying are, his favourite part of this is the intimacy. He likes Eddie so fucking much, he wants to be with him all the time and do everything in his limited powers to make him happy. And then Eddie tells him that he feels at least somewhat the same. Eddie has shared his thoughts with him, he’s shared his feelings with him and now he’s sharing his body with him in the most intimate way he can. As Richie’s hips slap against Eddie’s ass, and their breaths mingle and fingers clench together Richie knows that he is the most privileged man in the world to be able to share this moment with Eddie Kaspbrak.

He can feel himself drowning in the sensations, he’s not sure if he’s been making lo – fucking - Eddie for hours or for a shamefully short time, but he can feel the tightness in his belly telling him that he’s reaching his peak. From his stuttering and desperate rhythm, Eddie must sense it too, and tells him that he’s close. Richie spits into his hand, and wraps it around Eddie’s cock, making filthy sounds as he works him quickly, pumping frantically and swiping his thumb across the head, desperate to help Eddie finish before he does. With a final cry of Richie’s name, Eddie’s cock jerks, shooting his come all over his chest, his ass clenches and his walls writhe and spasm around Richie, who slams his hips into him one last time, driving deep with an inarticulate groan and he empties everything he has into the condom. 

There’s silence for the next few moments, punctuated only by the sound of their heavy breathing (to be fair that’s the most physical exertion Richie has had in years, so he can forgive himself for the fact that he sounds like a steam train right now). Eventually, Eddie leans up and kisses the tip of his nose. “Are you sure that’s the first time you’ve done that?”

Richie lets out a half-chuckle, not sure if he’s being made fun of or not.

“Really Richie,” Eddie continues peppering kisses along his jaw. “That was great. Would totally subscribe.”

Richie laughs deeply this time, and pulls carefully out of the other man. Eddie hops up off the bed, and walks into the adjoining bathroom with a slight wobble to his legs. Richie stays behind, still trying to get his breath back

“You better not be running away again!” he calls out over the sound of running water.

“I’m in my own house, where would I running to?” Eddie shouts back.

“I dunno, you seem like an escape tunnel kind of guy”

Eddie walks back in, shakes his head when he sees Richie struggling to tie off the condom, gives him an affectionate peck on the forehead before taking it from him, tying it quickly and depositing it in the trash can. He climbs back onto the bed, takes Richie’s glasses and puts them on the bedside table, shoves him down and manhandles his limbs around himself.

“Well I’m not going to interrupt cuddling again” he says, and sighs contently into Richie’s shoulder. 

All Richie’s body wants to do right now is slip into a sated doze, but as he lies there with nothing to do other than feel the gentle rise and fall of Eddie’s chest beneath his arm, his brain starts ticking over everything that’s happened over the past few hours. He hadn’t really had the chance to think earlier, everything had happened so quickly from Eddie crying, to confessing, to taking him back and showing him his room for the first time and then letting him fuck him – it had been this whirlwind that he’d just kind of gone along with without thinking about the consequences likes an idiot. The after- effects were only just catching up with him now, like he’d just dived on top of a grenade and is only now realising what is about to happen.

He’d made Eddie his boyfriend. Fuck. Why had he done that? How could he have done that to Eddie?

While Eddie had bared his soul and confessed his heart, Richie hadn’t reciprocated. Not really. Sure he’d told Eddie that he never had a boyfriend before or anything, and he had seemed genuinely surprised by the revelation, so Richie was pretty sure that Eddie wasn’t just using him for some sort of weird virgin kink or something. But Richie hadn’t told him just how worthless he’d always been, how every smattering of a relationship he’d ever had with a human being before he’d gone and fucked up. How he’d forced his cat into an imaginary role because that was the only way he’d stay around him, how he liked to use voices to berate himself, how those very voices right now were banging on the door, desperate to tell him everything that he’d refused to tell Eddie. Everything that he concealed. Richie thought he might have maybe been doing a halfway-passable job of being Eddie’s friend and keeping his feelings to himself, but no, somehow he had infected Eddie, tricked him into falling for him. He doesn’t even know how he’d done that, too stupid to even recognise the breadth of his inadequacies. Just like how his body was wrapped around Eddie now, he’d driven his claws into the innocent man and was going to drag him down, down to Richie’s level, down to…

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Eddie asks, and only then does Richie realise that he’s trembling and his breaths are heaving.

“It’s nothing” he says, choking on the lump in his throat. To his mortification, he’s nearly crying.

“I just…I’m sorry Eddie, I’m so sorry” he gabbles. “I didn’t mean to force you…trick…make you be with…you shouldn’t have to do this with me.” He knows he’s inarticulate, but it’s all he can manage to get out in between his wet gulps of air, just desperate to convey how sorry and ashamed he is, how it’s not Eddie’s fault.

“Look at me” Eddie says, cupping Richie’s face in his hands and tilting it so he can look straight into his eyes. 

“You didn’t make me do anything. I want to be here with you. I’m sorry it took me so long to realise it, but I really goddamn like you, you hear me?”

Richie nods, because he almost believes him. Eddie pulls him back into his arms, burying his head in his chest, while running his fingers softly down his back.

“It’s going to be okay Richie. I like being with you. It’s going to be okay.”

He repeats that over and over as Richie sobs into his chest. The crying and the self-flagellation is familiar to Richie, but he’s never had someone else there while he’s done it before. He always used to just cry until he was done, until he was empty and spent and had nothing less to give. But this feels different, like he’s working his way towards something, like Eddie is offering him something he needs to get to.

Maybe Eddie thinks Richie has something to offer him too.

“It’s going to be okay Richie. I like being with you. It’s going to be okay.”

Richie thinks that he believes him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They're finally together and there's 4 chapters left! Surely it's all going to be fluff from here and no angst whatsoever? Right?


	10. Co-op mode

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They've finally had the conversation and gotten (some) of their shit together. Now Richie and Eddie learn to navigate their new relationship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep planning on writing short chapters quickly, and then spending a month over long ones. Sorry about that.
> 
> Anyway, here's some fluff.

Ever since that day Richie spends a frankly inordinate amount of his time being happy. Mostly it’s like a pleasant hum of contentment radiating up from his gut, a continuous buzz reverberating in the back of his skull and flowing languidly through his veins. He feels like Dobbin looks when he’s wrapped around a radiator. It’s a feeling he’s been getting considerably more familiar with since he joined the _Clubhouse Collective_ , but after that day it’s coming through so much clearer as if Eddie has fixed the plumbing and he’s getting a nice steady flow now (Richie doesn’t tell Eddie this, though he does mention how he’d like Eddie to fix his pipes which gets him a pillow to the face and a sloppy blowjob). At other times though, the feelings of delight threaten to freeze up the pipes and burst out of him in a sickly display of garish rainbows and sherbet. While the Losers have all expressed their endorsement of Richie and Eddie’s new relationship in various ways (from Ben writing them a poem to Stan giving them a tiny nod of approval), he’s pretty sure the rest of staff are less keen on the way Richie will get distracted in meetings by giggling to himself at old messages Eddie has sent him, or will whistle badly without noticing all the stares and pointed adjustments of headphones from anyone else unfortunate to be in the room. But he can’t help himself. He gets to work here, be a Loser and has the honour of being boyfriend to one Mr Edward Munchkin Kaspbrak, Esq. 

There are still plenty of moments though where the old doubts coming stampeding back, often blaring very little warning before they’re battering on the doors and demanding that Richie hand over control of the castle once more. Because surely Eddie must have made a mistake, he must have missed something, or more likely it was Richie’s fault in some way, that he hadn’t noticed that all this time he’d been wearing the wrong skin and one day Eddie is going to rip it off and see the disappointment that’s lurking underneath. It feels like playing a particularly tense game of _Among Us_ where he’s the imposter and his lies and diversions are running out and he hasn’t got long before the Losers deduce his identity and heave him out of the spaceship into the inky blackness of space. What is perhaps most remarkable though, is just how good Eddie is at bringing him out of these particular crusades. 

After a couple of weeks of being together, Eddie declares that rather than always hanging out (sometimes clothed, sometimes not) at one of their places, they should go and out and do something together, like a sort of proper date. After kicking himself for not thinking of this first, Richie hastily volunteers to plan it all, and spends the next few days in a state of jittery, befuddled terror. He’s excited sure, after all this is Official Date Night With Eddie because they are A Proper CoupleTM, but also very, very confused because he has no idea what one does on an Official Date Night With Eddie because they are A Proper CoupleTM. What do dates consist of? If the cartoons of his youth taught him anything it’s that they involve sitting at a candlelit table, while a cat wearing a beret and a black and white stripey shirt with strings of garlic around his neck plays the violin at them. He does briefly ponder the idea of teaching Dobbin the violin, but ultimately figures that may be too ambitious for the three days he has left before the big night. At one point he considers asking the other Losers for ideas, but decides against it. Just because Eddie is apparently okay with how out of his depth Richie is with relationships, that doesn’t mean the others need to know about that. No reason to bother them with his amateurishness. 

So he finds himself, seven o’clock on a Friday night, outside Eddie’s front door, wearing a new and rather uncomfortable button-up shirt and holding a bouquet of assorted flowers (also who the hell knew flowers were that expensive? They grow on trees! And also apparently they all have different meanings, like there’s this ancient secret code drawn up long long ago that he must stick to lest he pay Eddie a grievous insult in the ancient floral tongue, instead of what is clearly a price-fixing scam by Big Flower. In the end he just buys a dozen different ones of random colours and slinks away from the cashier’s professionally stern gaze). Eddie opens the door four seconds after the first knock, and appears to be wearing a much nicer new shirt, but Richie is much too distracted by being tugged down into a kiss to fully take it in. A few wet seconds later, Richie pushes the flowers into Eddie’s hands. “Here I got you these…plants” he says.

Eddie eyes the flowers warily and doesn’t say anything for a while. “What do they do?” he questions after a few awkward seconds.

“Um, they smell?” Richie answers unsurely.

“They don’t get wi-fi or anything then?”

“No…”

Eddie hums noncommittally.

“I mean, they’re kind of pretty aren’t they?” Richie tries again.

“Richie, when did I ever give you the impression that I liked flowers?”

Richie shrugs helplessly. Eddie never gave him any such indicator, but he thought this was something you did in date circumstances right? God, was he wrong about that? How could he have messed this up so fundamentally? What an absolute, godawful id-

“Hey, stop that” Eddie says softly, snatching Richie’s hand and rubbing his thumb over it. “You didn’t do anything wrong. But you also don’t have to act like some cliché Casanova just to go on a date with me. I wanted to date you, not azalea boy.”

“I don’t think any of them are azaleas…”

“Please, neither of us know what an azalea is.”

“It sounds like a gross part of the digestive system” Richie giggles and Eddie gives him a peck on the cheek.

“You good?” Eddie asks. “Remember I wanted you for you.”

“Yeah” Richie affirms. “Besides, I also got you this” and he pulls an original Tamagotchi out of his pocket and Eddie positively coos in delight.

“Oh, I am going to take such good care of you, 8-bit Dobbin. Thank you” Eddie says and draws Richie into another lengthy kiss. 

“Remember to feed him” Richie murmurs against his lips. 

“Please. I always kept mine alive. Did you?”

“I’ll plead the fifth on that one” Richie says nonchalantly, before wrapping his arm around Eddie’s waist. “Let’s get going, your surprise awaits.” They walk off down the street, bickering about the merits of different electronic pets, flowers in hand and Tamagotchi slumbering peacefully in Eddie’s pocket.

Eddie’s surprise turns out to be ice-skating. Richie’s surprise is that Eddie, despite claiming to have not been skating since he was 12 years old and his mom banned him from ever going again because he came back with flushed cheeks, somehow glides around the rink with nonchalant ease while Richie clings to the side and watches his left leg decide to visit the west side of the rink, while his right absolutely insists on going to the east side instead. Eddie does call out tips and tries to guide him, but after Richie falls on his ass for the eighth time in as many minutes he tells him in a frank voice that he looks like a man who has decided to use a couple of giraffes as a pair of stilts, and then electrocuted the giraffes.

“Is this another thing you planned because you though it would be romantic?” Eddie asks.

Richie nods, peering up at Eddie and rubbing his backside.

“Do you want to go to the arcade instead?” Richie asks.

Eddie nods, agreeing that this is much more them. The spend the next few hours very happy, getting strange looks from the other patrons as they smack talk one another over rounds of _Dig-Dug_ (kisses for the winner), Eddie shows off his lightgun skills and Richie absolutely whoops his ass at _Street Fighter_.

It ends up being a very romantic night indeed.

Richie likes to think he gets better at date night after that. The next Friday he manages to surprise Eddie in the right way by taking him to a Star Wars expedition that has come to town, and Eddie spends the next three hours yammering excitedly, reeling off all the things he already knows and bouncing on the balls of his feet whenever he reads something he hadn’t heard before. Richie’s never really understood before how someone can be enamoured not with a something, but with someone else being enamoured with a something. He likes Stan an awful lot, but when he goes on about birds or the colour of Patty’s eyes after two glasses of red, Richie does start to check out. He’s always though it cute the way Ben looks at Bev when she’s talking about _Mass Effect_ or the way Bill stares at Mike like’s he the wisest man on Earth when he starts talking about the truths behind urban legends (seriously Mike, not every creepypasta has to be real), but he’s never really _understood_ it. Yet here he is, a man who likes Star Wars just fine but has never been a fanatic, and he’s watching Eddie talk on and on about details of the Ewok design process or which bounty hunter is definitely the coolest, and he’s utterly enamoured. He chips in with stuff he knows here and there, asks questions and makes various lewd jokes about gold bikinis and Hutt wieners, but for the most part he’s happy in just watching Eddie out himself as the biggest Star Wars nerd ever. There’s something about finding out about a passion of someone you ~~love~~ that you have feelings for, as if you’ve chipped away the clay and found some hidden beating heart inside that makes Richie feel incredibly happy.

Also it turns out Eddie really digs his Han Solo impression in the bedroom.

The following Friday Eddie takes Richie to the drive-in cinema to watch a marathon of classic slasher films. Richie’s seen them all a dozen times before, but never with someone else, and never at a classic drive in with its huge screen, old-fashioned speaker boxes and 1950s snack collection. He wiggles in his seat during the previews and holds Eddie’s hand during the films, squeezing it tight on every jump scare even though he knows they’re coming. From the corner of his eye he can spot Eddie watching him mouthing along to the words almost as much as he watches the screen. Neither of them pay much attention to the final act of the last film, much to busy exploring each other’s mouths and tasting hot dogs and popcorn on one another’s tongues.

Eddie does not appreciate Richie doing a Freddy Krueger impression as he fingers him that night, but Richie thinks it’s funny.

Eddie gets him back later by going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and then bursting back into the bedroom doing a perfect impersonation of Leatherface. The sound of Richie’s screams and Eddie’s laughter gets them a bigger complaint from the neighbour than the headboard pounding did earlier. 

Richie thinks his favourite moments though are when they’re just hanging out together. It still seems like they’re best friends, mutual best friends now he likes to think, spending time round one another’s watching or playing something, smack talking their respective video game prowess’s, talking about whatever random topics come to mind. But all of that is supplemented by hand holding and fingers stroking through hair, and soft kisses, which typically become hard kisses and mouths on chests and cocks and filthy acts of fucking. Richie hopes he’s getting better at it, he keeps a little map in his mind of all the spots on Eddie’s body that elicit the best reactions and catalogues the results of different techniques. He’d never realised that sex could have so much variety, that there was such a wide spectrum from fucking to lovemaking and everything in between. 

Even when they are fully clothed there’s something new to the relationship than before. They have morning routines together, slightly different depending on whose place they spent the night. They keep track of what groceries are in their respective cupboards, and whose turn it is to feed Dobbin. Eddie spends the better part of a fortnight helping him spruce up his flat, repainting the walls, laying down new carpet and assembling furniture. They bicker about colour choices, and Eddie bosses him around over the correct way of putting together an Ikea table, before testing it out by bending him over it and fucking the life out of him. Richie starts them on some YouTube cooking tutorials so they can both expand their pretty meagre repertoires and they start alternating between Eddie making something simple one night, then Richie doing the same and then them both tackling something more complicated together. It feels like they’re playing on the same team. It feels good.

It does take a little more time for anything more majorly serious to happen, but Richie ~~feels~~ hopes that they’re both comfortable with the pace. After a month or so Eddie starts telling him less filtered anecdotes about his childhood and his mother, confessing to the loneliness and weakness he felt growing up, and about his bouts of needing to take control and how it very nearly led to him destroying his relationship with the Losers. Richie lets him talk, and cry, helping in whatever way he can. He thinks that it’s odd, that finding out the person you are enraptured with is actually less perfect and more bruised than you ever would have guessed only makes them become your favourite even more. It’s a good month further before Richie is able to reciprocate and tell Eddie about how all those years of people telling him that he was a dumb, weird freak who should learn to keep his mouth shut convinced him they were right. He still sort of thinks they must have been correct, no matter what Eddie and the Losers say. Majority rule and all that. The deeper they get, the more they drive in one another’s mantle and haul out some unexploded bomb for defusing, the closer they seem to get.

Richie knows Eddie cares about him. He knows he cares about Eddie.

He doesn’t know which of these two things he likes more.

***

One thing that is a little strange is how adverse Eddie seems to be about talking to Maggie and Went. And Richie gets that meeting the parents is a _thing_ and a big scene in rom coms, but he’s also not sure why Eddie seems so particularly skittish about it. After all, the other Losers all know about them being a couple, as does the rest of the company, the neighbours and random people on the street who have seen them holding hands and smooching, so two people who live several hundred miles away finding out that they’re dating doesn’t seem like it would be too much for a certifiable badass like Eddie Kaspbrak to handle. But then one day Eddie lets himself into Richie flat with his key, ready to regale Richie with his complaints about the parking at the supermarket, when he spots that Richie is Skyping his parents, and he slams his mouth shut, and tiptoes over to cower silently in the kitchen, not even putting the shopping away for fear of making too much noise. A few weeks later, they’re both lounging on Richie’s bed when the laptop start chiming, Eddie gives it a brief startled look, before telling Richie that he better answer it and then rolling himself off the bed. As Richie is catching up with his parents he can spot Eddie commando crawling out of the room. Eventually he resolves to do something about it.

“Hey Eds,” he asks hesitantly one morning over breakfast, “would you be interested in meeting my folks? They’d like you I’m sure. And they don’t bite. At least not anywhere vital. And it would be over Skype so they couldn’t bite you anyway even if they tried. But do you want to try? Maybe?”

Eddie is gripping his toast tightly and look wary. “Do you want me to meet them?” he responds.

Richie’s first instinct is to say “It doesn’t matter, what do you want?”, but Eddie tells him off whenever he says that his opinion doesn’t matter. So he swallows and says “I mean I do kind of want to show you off. Plus you’re important to me and they’re important to me. It feels like these things should be combined.”

Eddie flushes and nods thoughtfully, but still squirms uncomfortably in his seat. “Are they…nice? I mean they sound it whenever you talk to them, but then I think about everything else. And, well…”

“Oh you mean how I acted shitty to everyone else in my past and they all hated me?” Richie answers cheerfully.

“I mean how all those people were shitty to you when you didn’t deserve it” Eddie corrects in that gentle but firm tone he uses in situations like this.

Richie shrugs. “They were the exception. I was a weird kid and I tried their patience a lot, but they always stuck with me. They love me. For some reason.” He tacks a smile on the end there to let Eddie know that he’s (partially) kidding about the ‘for some reason’.

“Oh.” Eddie nods again. “You know, I guess I kind of didn’t think people had good parents. They were a myth.”

“What like Santa Claus? Or what straight men think the female orgasm is?”

“Yeah,” Eddie chuckles. “I mean with my mom and everything, but also all the other Losers have crappy parents in some way or another. Never really occurred to me that wasn’t the case for everyone.”

“Hey I’m an innovator! I was a loser without being able to blame the parents!”

“Whatever,” Eddie says, smiling fondly. “Yeah, okay let’s do this. I was curious about what the mad scientists were thinking when they created you.”

Richie chucks some toast at Eddie, and then kisses him as an apology for getting jam on his sweater. 

Richie checks the calendar of Maggie’s appointments he keeps on his phone, and sees that tonight will actually be a good time to call. It’s only as they’re sitting on the couch with Dobbin stretched across their laps, and they’re listening to the ringtone that Eddie quickly grabs Richie’s wrist and asks in a hurried voice, “Wait they know about you being –“

“Gay? Oh yeah, ever since the Headphone Incident.”

“What the fuck is the –“ Eddie has to swallow the rest of his question because it’s just then that Maggie’s torso appears on screen and they can hear her grumbling as the camera jerks around wildly.

“You know, I don’t understand why we don’t just keep this in the same position each time, I swear we have feng shui gremlins some of the time, but, wait, ah there we go.” Her bright, tired face comes into focus and her smile turns into a look of surprise. “Hi Richie. Did you know there’s a boy sitting next to you, or is that a ghost?”

“Hi Mags, and, um yes I did. This is Eddie.”

Eddie waves awkwardly and Maggie’s face lights up. “Oh the famous Eddie! Richie’s told me so much about you, I hoped I’d get to meet you,” Richie can feel Eddie give him a slight side eye at that point. “Now you work with Richie very closely on the game don’t you?” 

“Nice to meet you Mrs Tozier” Eddie says in the politest voice Richie has ever heard him use. “And yes I do.”

“Now please tell me – what exactly is an ‘escort mission’? Richie’s tried to explain before, but I’ve never understood. Is it as lewd as it sounds?”

“Oh, no it’s not that, um, sort of escort.” Eddie answers nervously. “It’s where you are having to protect another character, like a weaker one, while they move from one place to another. So you’re ‘escorting’ them I guess. But like with a gun.”

Maggie nods. “So why does Richie complain about them so much?”

“Well, I guess it’s because…” And Eddie launches into a discussion of the pros and cons of varying mission structures, Maggie punctuating it with questions and seemingly delighting in his answers. She covers a wide range of topics from work, to what shows he and Richie have been watching together. Richie chips in occasionally, but Eddie is doing well by himself for the most part. Richie had a slight fear, based on how Maggie had always reacted whenever he mentioned another kid from school even in passing, that if ever actually got a friend then she would tie them down and interrogate them for hours. Which is sort of what she was doing right now, but it was so much gentler than he’d half-feared. She wasn’t asking Eddie about where he came from, what his ambitions where, what his parents were like, any of those questions Richie always assumed protective parents asked. Instead she enquires about things Eddie is interested in and follows along with what he says, which seems much less intimidating for his boyfriend. Eddie had been gripping his hand in a deathly-tight clutch, just off camera, when the call began, but as it went on it grew looser and looser until their fingers were just gently threaded together. Which reminds Richie, he should probably get on with what they intended to do.

“So Mags, Eds and I wanted to let you know…” Richie interrupts their discussion of classic movies, the enormity of what he’s about to growing again in his chest. He looks over at Eddie and sees nervous determination and a slight nod there. Before he can bottle it, he raises their linked hands up and into view.

“Um. We and Eddie are dating.” 

Maggie lets out a whoop, an honest-to-god whoop and claps her hands. “Yes! That is such good news! I really hoped that was the case, I mean I knew of course that you liked Eddie from the first time you mentioned him, and-“

“Wait what?” Richie exclaims. “I didn’t even know I liked Eddie at point!”

“Oh honey. I know.” She gives him a look. “And from the way you spoke about it I could tell Eddie liked you back,” Eddie lets out a slight yelp at this, “but I wasn’t sure if you two were ever actually going to do anything about it. So, tell me who – oh wait, your father’s back. Went, come here, I need to tell you something.”

Went shuffles into view behind Maggie, muttering grumpily. “That bloody car, it’s doing the thing with the dragging and that weird ‘chug’ noise whenever I’m going uphill. I can’t believe that mechanic said he’d fixed it, I knew he was making it up!”

Eddie clears his throat. “It could be the carburettor connection shaft.” Or at least that’s what Richie thinks he said. He could have actually said that he thought it was the iguana sexual enhancement volcano for all he knows. Eddie isn’t a full gear head by any means, but he does go out to fiddle with his car on weekends occasionally, while Richie just watches him work, nodding along to whatever technical nonsense he says and trying to resist the urge to lick that smear of grease on his cheek.

Went jumps a little at the sound of Eddie’s voice. “Oh. Well, thank you…?”

“This is Eddie” Maggie supplies. 

Went’s eyebrows dart up briefly, before he composes himself again. “It started happening last winter, could that have caused it?”

The two of them exchange some more gobbledegook, before Richie and Maggie catch each other’s eye and decide that maybe they should hurry this along. “Went. Eddie is Richie’s boyfriend” she interjects.

The eyebrows again, followed by the broadest smile Richie has seen on his father’s face in years. “Congratulations! So tell me – who asked who first?”

Richie and Eddie launch into a (sanitised) version of how they got together and everything that’s happened. They four of them talk for a long while, but eventually Maggie does start to fade. Just before they go Went asks Richie one last question. “Now, I know we went over the bees and the bees after the Headphone Incident, but do you boys need a refresher?” He looks deadly serious, but Maggie laughs and swats him on the arm and Eddie turns bright red.

“No, not talking about that! Time to go, great to talk, speak soon, love you bye!” Richie says hurriedly, closing the laptop lid as he does so. He can still hear Maggie’s laughter as Eddie lets out a sigh of relief, and start talking about just how much he liked Richie’s folks.

Richie mostly just nods along. He’s brought two of his spheres of happiness together.

***

By easy agreement, they don’t tell Sonia. In none of Eddie’s fortnightly calls to his mother is Richie’s name mentioned.

It’s not a problem.

***

In fact it’s a few months more before Richie does have a problem. There’s nothing really there to cause it, but his own dumb self manages to find a way to make it into a crisis anyway. The shame doesn’t make it any less real though.

They’re both round Eddie’s place, where they’ve been hanging out for most of the weekend. Eddie has to pop into the office for a couple of hours though, to do some interviews with a pair of additional sound guys they’re thinking of bringing in. Richie offers to cook and have dinner ready for him when he comes back, but Eddie surprises him by pulling a chicken pasta bake out of the fridge.

“I’ll message you when I’m leaving work. Just stick it in the oven then to heat up and it’ll be good to go by the time I get back” he says with a smirk, clearly happy to have taken the lead in their two-person cooking class.

“Damn Eddie. You just think of everything don’t you?” Richie grins back.

“Damn straight. You owe me Tozier.” Eddie finger-guns him, grabs his jacket and keys, goes to the door, pops back to kiss Richie on the cheek and leaves. 

Richie is left standing there. He knows he ought to go do something, but he doesn’t. Those words ‘you owe me’ are still sitting there on the kitchen counter in giant red letters staring at him. They’re true. Richie does owe Eddie a lot, much more than he will ever be able to pay.

He’s not that much of a fool, not as bad as he used to be at least, that he doesn’t know that Eddie is happy in the relationship. Eddie has told him as such, in both words and actions, and Richie believes him. He knows Eddie very well by now, and is able to tell when Eddie is saying something he doesn’t really mean. He’s seen it at work meetings, and in the time Eddie said he would up for trying whipped cream in the bedroom when Richie suggested it – that steady eye contact and slight, almost imperceptible wrinkle in the nose that showed that Eddie’s wasn’t a hundred percent behind this particular idea. So Richie is sure that Eddie is telling the truth about wanting to be in a relationship with Richie and that he’s happy with how it’s going.

But happiness doesn’t equal debt forgiveness.

Richie tells himself that over and over, berating himself for how deep he’s allowed the debt to become, how hopeless his chances of ever being able to pay it back are, how stupid he is for not even coming up with an idea to try and make even the smallest of down payments. He doesn’t talk to anyone else and no one talks to him, it’s just Richie and his thoughts pacing around the kitchen, around and around, in tighter and tighter loops as the loan sharks circle around him.

He doesn’t realise it’s been two hours until his phone vibrates to tell him that Eddie is coming back.

He rushes to shove the dish into the oven, and lays the table much more carefully than normal, adding a couple of candles that he finds in a drawer. Checking the wine-matching app that Eddie recommended him, he picks a shiraz from Eddie’s wine fridge, before ducking into the bathroom to check his face in the mirror. He scrubs the disappointed tears and the blotchiness from his cheeks and spends two minutes with his eyes closed and breathing deeply until he feels sufficiently composed. He goes to the bedroom and changes his shirt, trying to pick the nicest one from the collection he keeps in Eddie’s closet. By the time he’s back at the table and pouring the wine, he can hear Eddie’s keys in the front door. This is fine. He’s perfectly composed and ready to be better for Eddie.

“One of the sounds guys was excellent, we’re definitely going to bring him in, the other was an absolute idiot, I honestly cannot believe – oh this all looks great, thanks babe” Eddie enters the room, chattering away and glancing at the table. “Anyway so this Jake person is saying that he thinks we should use – what’s wrong?” He’s sitting down and staring directly at Richie with concern etched onto his face, which doesn’t make any sense because Richie is perfectly calm and the very picture of serenity.

“What do you mean? Nothing’s wrong. Carry on with the story, you know I love it when you bitch” Richie responds in a collected voice.

Eddie’s brow crinkles. “Richie, you know I care about you a lot by now right? And please don’t take this the wrong way or anything…but you have the worst poker face in human history. I can tell there’s something wrong, something happened while I was away.”

Richie shrugs awkwardly. Something was wrong sure, but nothing had _happened_ , not as such. Eddie had said something, and Richie had finally realised an obvious fact that anyone who wasn’t an idiot would have understood weeks ago.

Eddie sighs. “I know you talk to yourself a lot about things. That’s fine, you can do that if you want of course. But you can talk to me as well about bad stuff you know. The option’s there if you want it.”

Richie nods noncommittally. Bites his lip. Picks up his glass of wine, swirls it, puts it back down again. Grabs a piece of garlic bread, tears off a hunk and chews it dryly. Eddie watches him softly from the other side of the table, silent, like Richie is a skittish animal he doesn’t want to spook. 

He does want to tell Eddie. He knows he shouldn’t, that dumping all this crap onto Eddie would only increase the debt, but he’s so very tempted. Eddie did say he could. He shouldn’t though. Maybe he should.

“It’s just how much I owe you” he says, unbidden. Eddie doesn’t say anything back, but motions for him to continue.

“You’ve done so much for me. The other Losers as well, but you in particular. Before I met you all, before you and me were, well, you and me, I was…a mess. And not even a hot one. You know I never had any friends or anything, tried to avoid other people, and I always though I deserved it. I was too rude, too abrasive and weird and dumb for anyone who wasn’t a cat, a parent or a figment of my imagination to want to actually spend time with me. I still thought that for a long time even after I joined the company. I just figured you weren’t seeing what I was really like somehow, or you were just overlooking it. Didn’t realise you were too smart not to notice. And too fussy not to complain.” Eddie lets out a slight snort.

“I’m not even sure when it really happened, but I began to realise maybe I wasn’t that bad. Maybe you weren’t delusional to want to be around me. But that doesn’t set aside what you did. You got me out of that clusterfuck I was in and made me happier than I’ve ever been before. There’s no way I’m ever going to be able to do the same for you. I get that you like dating me and everything, but it’s not the same thing. You like basically saved me from a burning building. I can’t recreate that.”

He runs out of steam. Takes another bite of garlic bread. “So. Yeah.” He slurps some wine to mask the silence from the other side of the table.

“You’re my favourite idiot” Eddie says, and Richie chokes on the wine.

“I told you just how much of a problem I had with trying to be self-reliant about everything, and how little I realised that was even an issue in the first place” Eddie continues. “Then I met you and I just wanted to share everything with you. You make me want to be vulnerable. You make me happy. And you make me want to do better. So don’t claim that you have a monopoly on being saved because you absolutely help fix me just as much as I help fix you. We were the identical dumbasses staring at one another for months and not just saying how we felt, and now we’re still the same identical dumbasses but we’re helping one another.”

Silence.

“You’re thinking of that meme with the two Spider-Men pointing at one another aren’t you?” Eddie asks.

Richie grins and nods. Eddie gives an exaggerated eye-roll. “As I said – my favourite idiot.”

Richie laughs, leans across the table and kisses Eddie softly. “You’re my favourite idiot as well” he tells him. “Thank you” he whispers.

“Anytime. Now, can we please eat the pasta bake? I am very hungry and spent an embarrassingly long time trying to make it correctly and I want you to be impressed already.”

So they eat dinner, Richie making plenty of over-the-top “mmm” sounds and rubbing his tummy throughout, they drink some more wine, watch a movie and go to bed and make love slowly.

It’s only when he’s drifting off to sleep that Richie realises how quickly he believed Eddie just now. There weren’t any voices whispering doubts and scepticism in the back of his head. Eddie Kaspbrak casts quite the silencing spell.

***

Someone suggests that the next Losers Night Out (guest starring Honorary Loser-Lite Patty Blum) should be a day out instead, and the group chat ends up settling on a trip to a local theme park. Richie is very excited, he hasn’t been since he was a kid with his parents, when he spent half of his time asking to borrow Maggie’s high heels so he could get on the big rides.

It doesn’t surprise him at all that his little commander of a boyfriend plans the trip down to the finest point – an exact itinerary based on aggregate queuing data to work out in which order they should hit the rollercoasters to ensure maximum thrill-to-chill time ratios. What does seem a little more unexpected is just how incredibly enthusiastic Eddie is about enormous rollercoasters. Richie had assumed that his control issues would have made him wary of strapping himself to a piece of metal and letting the bored 17-year old at the controls press the button and send him plunging into a pit at 60 miles per hour, but apparently this is exactly the sort of adrenaline therapy he loves. The fact that Patty is also enthusiastic about rides doesn’t shock Richie, but he certainly hadn’t expected her dry martini of a husband to join her, but it turns out Stan adores shrieking likes a banshee on a drop ride. Mike completes the little rollercoaster squad, chattering enthusiastically about the various speed statistics and records of each ride as they giddily queue up.

Bev and Bill meanwhile are decidedly not fans of the huge thrill rides, and happily spend the day wandering about the park’s more tamer fare. Bill gets into a lengthy discussion with the attendant at the haunted house about the Lovecraftian themes they used (the guy clearly couldn’t give a damn, but nodded along anyway) and Bev ends up having to take her shoes off so she can ride the Happy Caterpillar Fun Ride For Kiddies, an act which doesn’t embarrasses her in the least. 

So Richie finds himself in the in-between group with Ben. Richie is first in line with the others for the first coaster of the day, delighted to finally be able to go on something his younger self missed out on, but ends up finding the effects on his stomach and vision takes some recovery time afterwards before he’s ready for the next one. Ben meanwhile is terrified of big rides, but also fascinated by them and the physics and engineering behind them, and he and Mike have read up on all of them extensively. But after each white-knuckler it takes him a while to build his courage meter back up enough to brave another one. So the pair of them end up bouncing around for the day, sometimes with the hardcore quad, sometimes with Bev and Bill, sometimes by themselves. And honestly, Richie is thrilled with this outcome. He didn’t realise until today just how much time he and Eddie had been spending with one another, but it turns out hanging out separately with their other friends doesn’t seem like they’ve been amputated from one another in the way that Richie feared it might. They still all meet up for lunch, but don’t feel the need to sit next to each other, and when they do ride together they don’t hold hands instead holding three of their hands in the air in the accustomed coaster fashion (Eddie has both hands up, Richie only one, because the other is being choked to death in Ben’s steel grip).

He’s good with this, he really, genuinely is. He’s happy to spend time having fun with the other Losers, eating too much cotton candy with Ben and darting between coasters, water rides and banana boats. But still. Catching sight of Eddie, arm in arm with Stan and Patty with an elated grin on his face, or slugging Mike playfully in the shoulder and giggling it’s…No it’s fine. It’s nothing.

He’s not jealous, he’s seriously not. He knows Eddie doesn’t have feelings for any of them like that and is committed to their relationship. And it’s not like he doesn’t like the idea of his Eddie spending time with others, he’s allowed to do that of course, he isn’t even _his_ Eddie anyway, he’s his own incredible person whom Richie is allowed to orbit. It’s just that, well, Richie needs Eddie more than the others do. 

And isn’t making Eddie grin and giggle supposed to be his job? He knows Eddie isn’t going to get bored of him just because Mike told a joke or anything, but a little bit of Richie is squatting there in his brain, telling the rest of him about how he isn’t holding up his end of the bargain and giving Eddie everything he needs.

Of course, Richie would like to think he’s being subtle about his feelings, but he’s beginning to accept the fact that perhaps he isn’t all that surreptitious about his little self-induced panics. So it’s not really a surprise that, mid-way through the queue for the rapids, Ben gently steers the conversation to asking how his and Eddie’s relationship is going. Even though he senses what Ben might be getting at, he jammers away for the first few minutes about just how much fun Eddie is, how smart and clever he is, and his excellent taste in movies and games and (after a quick glance around to check there are no kids in earshot) how insanely good in bed he is. This bit is easy, Richie would happily run up to strangers on the street and tell them how amazing his boyfriend is and how pretty he looks naked if only he had the courage to do so, but it isn’t until they’re loading into the circular rafts that he finally managers to build up the gall to say “I just wish I could match him, you know?”

Ben pulls down his harness and nods solemnly. “I thought the same thing back when me and Bev first got together.”

“Really?” Richie exclaims, pulling his own harness down. “But you’re this sweet, chiselled Greek statue.”

Ben chuckles. “Well, back then, and now to an extent, but really back then, I was the nervous ex-chubby kid who couldn’t believe the cool girl liked him” he says as they _chugga-chugga_ up the ramp. “I kept trying to do everything I could to do to equalise the imbalance. Bought her roses every day, paid for limos on dates, tried to learn the violin, all of that. She ended up feeling completely overwhelmed and thought she wasn’t doing enough for the relationship. Caused quite the fight I can tell you.”

“But you know what I eventually realised?” he continues. “That good relationships aren’t based on a push-pull of each side trying to match the other. It’s not about one person pulling more weight than the other. Don’t think of two people trying to push a car out of the mud, think of two legs moving one person. Which leg is stronger doesn’t matter, what’s important is how they move together.”

Ben would seem like a very wise sage indeed right now, if it weren’t for the fact that as soon as his speech ends, the raft spins and dunks him right under a waterfall. He looks less like a learned philosopher and more like a sexy, soaking marshmallow. It’s not clear which of them laugh loudest.

Still, Ben’s words stick in his head when he next sees Eddie, snorting hysterically at Patty’s impression of Stan’s g-force face. He pecks him on the cheek, but doesn’t mind when Eddie mingles freely with the others as all eight of them get in line for the log flume, their last ride of the day. Richie buys the photo afterwards and gazes fondly at it for most of the car ride home. All of them are pulling different ridiculous terrified faces, with Richie and Eddie clutching one another, chests pressed together and screaming gleefully. 

It’s Richie’s new favourite possession. 

***  
They keep calling Maggie and Went on a regular basis, sometimes together, sometime individually. Richie is pretty sure his parents are ready to sign Eddie’s adoption papers.

Maggie keeps ducking out of the calls early looking sleepy, but she’s very enthusiastic about everything before then.

***

Richie is at work, alone in his and Eddie’s room. Everyone else is somewhere else, at lunch or at meetings, but he’s here trying to fix some stupid programming mistake he made. He’s berating himself for making this dumb error that reek of amateur hour, when he realises something quite out of the blue – it’s just Richie complaining about Richie right now. There’s no other voices, no imaginary people circling the room and hurling insults at him, none of the half-memories half-demons that he used to like to bring out to flagellate himself in circumstances like this. In fact, he doesn’t think he’s conjured a single one of these since he and Eddie had that conversation.

He smiles to himself, and gets back to correcting the error.

***

Richie is at home one evening, alone with Dobbin. He’s playing with him, jerking around some catnip-scented toy that Eddie bought, watching the cat scrabble after the fabric mouse like some sort of jumpy, wide-eyed piranha. It’s in that moment, just as Dobbin lets out a frustrated mwroah that he realises just how long it’s been since they had a conversation. He doesn’t talk to him anymore, not like he used to. The imaginary magic cat that he forced into ridiculous outfits in order to give him life advice, is gone.

Richie loves his pet called Dobbin, he’s a wonderful companion.

But Dob, his first ever best friend is gone.

He picks up his cat and cuddles him close. A couple of tears sink into his fur.

***

It’s another month or so before they have their first fight, and as far as Richie can tell, it comes out of bloody nowhere.

They’ve had a long day at worked, cooped up in their office almost the entire time. Eddie is working on a chase sequence that he designed, one for which Bev has given him some rather negative playtester feedback. “Goddamn morons,” he mutters under his breath as finishes his adjustments and reloads the test environment again, “I mean look at the size of the thing! Can’t they tell this is an enemy they should run away from rather than fight? But no, apparently not.” Richie meanwhile is fine getting on with own work, at least for a while. Normally Eddie’s frustrated whisperings are perfectly commonplace background noise, his exhaled curses are practically a white noise machine to him by this point. But today it has been going on a lot longer than usual, and Eddie is discarding his various attempts after shorter and shorter tests.

So Richie quietly designs a quick animatic test sequence and silently drops it into Eddie’s folder. Only when he hears Eddie ask him “Richie, what’s this?” does he spin around and his chair and describe it to him. “So Eds, I was thinking if we insert this sequence into the tunnels section, the first time the player sees the monster is it charging towards them knocking over support beams and collapsing the ceiling, so naturally they’ll start to run away and we script the rubble to separate the player from the monster after a few seconds. Then when the chase part kicks off, they’re already primed to run away from him. Good, right?” he grins.

Eddie doesn’t look at him, but just watches through the footage again before nodding briefly. “Yeah, that should work. Good job” he says in a flat voice, and starts putting the sequence together in the test simulator.

By the end of the day Richie can tell that Eddie is still tense, so keeps up a stream of jokes as he follows him to his car for the drive back to Eddie’s house. He gets a few short chuckles here and there, but nothing like the usual frequency. When they get there, Eddie says that he wants to put some time into making progress on _Spider Man_ and Richie, brushing his fingers affectionally down the back of Eddie’s neck, notices just how tense his shoulders are and says that he’ll give him a massage. Back before he had the sound of a softly-breaking Kaspbrak to lull him to sleep at night, Richie watched a lot of ASMR videos and has picked up a few techniques that normally do the trick. And indeed as he works he can feel the knots dissolving away, but Eddie’s frown stays just as deeply etched onto his face as he keeps getting Peter Parker’s ass kicked by the Rhino. Richie has taken to web-slinging around New York whenever he needs some thinking time at work, so the next time Eddie dies and lets out a frustrated growl, Richie leans over, picks up the controller and hits restart and shows Eddie the best method to take down the boss. 

“See?” he says with a smile. Eddie does not smile back.

Instead he snatches the controller back, jumps to his feet and loudly snaps “What the hell Richie? What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You’ve been like this all goddamn day!”

Richie doesn’t react, he doesn’t know how to. He’s never seen Eddie direct his anger at him before, and it takes his brain a good while to catch up to what’s going on, so he just sits there staring dumbly with his mouth open.

“You think I can’t play a goddamn game by myself do you?” Eddie continues unabated. “That I’m someone incapable of relaxing myself huh? Am I baby to you or something, are you going to feed me and wipe my fucking chin next? And why are you acting so high and mighty at work like you can solve any freaking problem that you come across? In case you’ve forgotten I’ve been in this industry just as long as you, and I’ve created much bigger titles than you, so maybe you could drop this goddamn Midas act you have going on you think?”

Richie’s brain has caught up now, and it’s stiffening his muscles and tightening his throat and pouring out anger into his body. 

“Did I ask for your help even once today?” Eddie shouts. “Because I don’t recall doing that! But that didn’t stop you just digging in anyway now did it?”

“Hey fuck you Eddie!” Richie spits back. “I was only trying to help, never realised you’d had such a stick up your ass about it! In fact you always seemed to like it, you kept on telling me to say what I thought, that my opinion meant something. But I guess you thought it was worthless after all! Don’t tell me to offer you my help and then throw it back into my goddamn face like this!”

Richie is breaking heavily, his anger is circling his heart and snarling at Eddie. His pride has been wounded and he wants to hit back, to show that he can push back against the bully having a go at him, that he’s not the weak little dweeb he used to be. This time he wants to fucking win.

“Christ Richie, you can be really suffocating at time, you know that? What are you even doing here? I didn’t ask you to come over, you just followed me to the car and climbed in without asking! You’re always here, always in my face, always talking, I don’t think I can ever get a moment’s peace anymore because you’re always wrapped around me wherever I go! Can I not get some time to myself to just fucking breathe for once?”

Richie’s eyes swim red. Being around Eddie, being able to _help_ Eddie is the most important thing in the world to him, and he’s not going to let anyone take that away from him, Eddie included. He’ll do anything to stop that happening.

“Fine Eddie, I’ll you breathe,” he says in seething coldness, “if you stop using me as a dumping ground for your mommy issues.”

With that he whirls around, strides to the front door and storms out, not bothering to slam it behind him, too satisfied with his victory to do so.

The flush of his anger and pride, that throbbing impulse to defend his newly-inflated ego and attack anyone who opposes his relationship with Eddie, even if that person is Eddie himself, continues to thrum through his body for several minutes. But as he sits there on the bus, his breathing gradually slows, the redness running through him retreats and the trembling tension ekes away leaving only shame and guilt at the horror of what’s he done. He sinks down into his seat and he can feel the glare of the other passengers all staring at him. He avoids looking at any of them, sure they are all wearing that same look of hurt that Eddie had after Riche dropped his parting insult. How could he have done such a thing?

Maybe Eddie was right, and he has been too clingy. He’s been so enamoured with the opportunity to do things for Eddie, to spend time with him, to touch him whenever he wants, that maybe he ended up going overboard with it. That’s happened before for sure, every time any kid showed the slightest inclination to hang out with him he’d abuse the chance and latch onto them like a chattering leech. Sure, he would have liked it if Eddie had been nicer about telling him to back off, but what bothered him now wasn’t the hurt that that had caused but how it had made Richie respond to the hurt. Where had that anger come from? Before he’d only ever directed venom like that at a few negative reviews on his indie games, and even then he’d thought better of it and edited his replies before posting. Normally whenever anyone went after him like that he’d try and joke his way out of it, make a quick exit and go home and cry. Not raise his hackles, hit back and try and wound the other person in whatever underhand way he thought that would make him win.

This is what all the pride and self-respect he’s gained since joining the _Clubhouse Collective_ had done to him. Made him think he is something worth getting angry over.

He gets back to his flat in a blur and paces around it, terrified that he’s going to lose Eddie the man he ~~loves~~ has more feelings for than anyone else in the world. When the familiar Zelda theme plays he knows this must be it, Eddie would normally just let himself in with his key, if he’s ringing the doorbell he must have thought it was the politer thing to do when returning said key. Richie walks to the door with heavy feet, gulps air and opens it.

He steps back from the force of a small man charging into him, wrapping his arms around him and burying his head in his chest. 

“Richie I’m so sorry” he hears a distressed voice say.

“It’s okay. I’m the one who should be sorry Eds” Richie answers. Nothing more is said for a while. Instead they stand there in the doorway, wrapped around one another and breathing together. Richie turns his head and nuzzles his nose into Eddie’s hair.

Eventually he hears a nondescript rumbling from his chest. “Mmphs em mmpahsnemf to you too Eddie” he says back.

A snort, and Eddie pulls his head back. “I reckon we should probably have a talk” he says.

Richie nods and leads Eddie back to the couch, where they sit down and let Dobbin shift back and forth between their respective laps.

“Eds, I really am sorry, I should never have said those things, it was so horrible and I don’t mean them, not at all, I just wanted to win and I’m sorry” Richie says in a gabble, determined to get his part in first.

Eddie nods. “Thank you. But I’m more sorry. All couples fight I get that, but I was the one who started it. It’s just that…I was calling my mother last night. And she was going on and on about how she used to take care of me, how she still should be and it would be for my own good. All the usual stuff, but somehow it just got to me. I kept thinking back to how small it made me feel, having her being there doing everything for me, how suffocating it was of being around her constantly. No matter what I did she was just there, surrounding me all the time. I guess I couldn’t help but notice how we spend all out time together – we share an office together, we go back to one of our places, sleep over and go to work together the next day and repeat it all over. Sometimes, it just feels too much like being around Sonia again.” 

He paused. “And no Richie, before you say, I wasn’t fucking my mum. That bit’s different.”

“You know me too well” Richie smirks and Eddie smiles back, before his face grows serious again.

“We didn’t really go into this relationship the normal way. We didn’t date for months before agreeing to move in together. I think we just find of fell into doing that, while also working together all the time. And I know a lot of it is my own issues and it’s something irrational I should work on, but – I need independence. I need to know I can do things by myself without having you, or anyone, there to cover for me if I struggle or make a mistake.” He paused again. “I think –“

“Do you want us to break up?” Richie asks in a small voice.

“What? Fuck, no that’s the last thing I want. I love you.”

Eddie freezes, jaw open and eyes wide, as if he can’t quite believe what he just said. He glances at Richie, looking like someone who has just done something embarrassing in public and is now surreptitiously trying to see if anyone noticed.

“You know I love you too right?” Richie says. The words come out easier than he expected.

Relief blossoms on Eddie’s face and he leans in and they kiss gently. 

“I don’t want to break up” Eddie says. “Or go on a break or anything like that. But I do think that maybe we shouldn’t spend all of our time together. At least not yet. I don’t want to lose us by going too fast.”

Over the next hour they talk it out, agreeing how best to make their relationship work without being overwhelming for either one of them. They decide to cut back on the amount of time they spend together at one of their places, so they sleep over no more than four nights each week, at least for now. They keep the weekly date nights, but also agree that they should start attending the events again with all of the rest of the Losers, like _Age of Empires_ Mondays and _Among Us_ Thursdays rather than sacking them off to just be by themselves. Each of them is going to try and spend more time individually with their friends as well, rather than always attending hangouts as a couple. Games and TV shows are divided up into those that still have to be experienced together and those that they can indulge in independently.

Most importantly, is Richie’s suggestion that they should probably not be working in the same room. The next day, he starts to move into his new office which is on the other side of the floor. If they both lean back in their chairs at the right time they can still wave to one another, but otherwise get to have their own spaces.

It does take Richie a while to decide what to decorate the room with. He wants to keep his collection of posters and memorabilia at his and Eddie’s houses and he does find it helpful to add whiteboards to his office walls and images from the game – concept art of the monster and environments, model renderings of the seven kids they’ve got as playable characters. Eventually he hits upon the idea of adding pictures of what really inspires him – the other Losers. So he grabs his camera and spends the rest of the day getting photos of them all. Some are posed, like the one of Bev surrounded by promotional material, others are more real, with one sneaky one of Eddie furiously typing away without him knowing Richie was there, others are attempts at being subtly but end up being rather odd, because it turns out people tend to notice their lanky friend crouched beneath their desk. But he’s pretty happy with the collection he gets.

The prize picture is a blown-up copy of the one from the theme park, all of them pulling silly poses on the log flume and Richie and Eddie in the centre, locked together, looking ridiculous and in love.

***

Richie is almost embarrassed about how happy he is with his life now. It seems almost immortal, like they’ve both fought their issues and won, and now nothing can shatter the Olympus they’ve built together.

Which is why that call from Went doesn’t feel real. Not at first.


	11. Crunch time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things go wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sure a lot of y'all knew this already, but this is is very heavy, angsty chapter.
> 
> For content warnings, see notes at the end.

It didn’t make any sense, Richie reflected, that this should happen now. His mind had begun to wander, devoid of anything else to do and had settled on bitterly questioning the existence of the inevitable disaster he’d just fallen into. The frantic, single minded determination of ‘get there now’ that had accompanied him ever since his father had called, all through the manic packing, briefly talking to Eddie and jotting off a quick email to the other Losers, the dash to the airport, the pacing round the departure lounge, the gripping the arms of the seat and staring fixedly and blankly out of the plane window, sitting in the car with Went and navigating the maze of corridors – that had all faded. Now he was sore and stiff from sitting for hours on the cheap, foldout chair, doing nothing but stare at the sleeping form of his mother. 

So what his brain had decided to dwell on was the burning question of why this was happening now of all times. You don’t expect something like this happen in the midst of blazing happiness, anymore than you expect to be struck by lightening on a cloudless, sunny day. But then again, that wasn’t really true. This lightening bolt was always inevitable, they had known that for years, known that at some unspecified point the treatments were going to stop working, as if her body had simply changed its mind one day and decided to tell its owner to go fuck herself and be done with it. Yet just because the sniper’s bullet was inescapable, doesn’t mean that the timing of it made a lick of sense. Everyone expects to have their car breakdown at some point, but no one thinks it’s going to happen as they’re driving away from the church with a ‘Just Married’ sign and some cans attached to the back. Richie had been happy, for what was probably the first time since he was a kid. All those years of everyone else disliking him because he was loud and annoying and weird and inappropriate had taught him the very clear lesson that these people were right, that he was the sort of person who shouldn’t be forced onto others. But somehow in his quiet isolation he’d managed to perform some surgery on himself without realising and fixed these defects, at least in part, so when he’d started working at _Clubhouse Collective_ the Losers had been able to befriend him and Eddie had been able to fall in love with him. So the universe had to find a new way to tell him that he was worthless and deserved to be miserable and decided to use an innocent woman to deliver the message.

Maggie Tozier had dealt with her cancer with charm and grit for the past five years and refused to let it stop her from doing anything. Richie had just moved out from home and across the country when she first got the diagnosis, but she hadn’t told him for another 6 months. She didn’t want him to feel that he had to come back when he’d just started living his life and working on video games like he’d always wanted. At least that’s what she told him. Over the years she’d fiercely managed her treatments, getting consultants and doing all her reading and getting hit by it over and over again, before climbing right back onto the saddle and demanding another ride.

But not anymore.

She’d always been clear to her son that this day was coming, and he nodded and cried and said he understood whenever she said that, but that still doesn’t make what he sees now any more believable. 

It’s true she’d never been a tall woman, several inches shorter than her husband and outgrown by her son by his thirteenth birthday. But she’d never once before seemed small, possessing an energy and attitude that demanded the attention of someone ten times her height. Now see looked tiny in the middle of the voluminous bed, like she’d been laid out to dry and shrivel in the sun. Her smallness was made even more incongruous by the swelling in her lower body, with her belly bulging and her legs and feet swollen up to elephantine levels. It almost looked like someone had shoved a hose into her legs and pumped them fully of silly putty. They dipped into the air mattress, heavy and squishy and bulging in all the wrong places, glowing with a sickly shimmer of sweat. Perhaps all this weight had come trickling down from higher up till it pooled and stagnated in her feet, because her arms were thin and brittle, the skin hanging from them like the tattered burial robe hanging from the arms of a skeleton. The face was gaunt and hollow, like that of someone starving in some far-off somewhere that you see in a slow-motion advert set to mournful music, the face of a person that makes you swear to yourself that you really should give some money or something, before skipping the ad and forgetting about the face all together. Now it sits, facing straight up amidst the nest of the loose hairs that surround it on the pillow. 

She stays like that for hours, unmoving save for the rise and fall of her bony chest, but when a nurse comes to adjust her IV, her eyes creak open and she spots Richie sitting there and life drops back into her body. She greets him cheerfully and begins talking normally, apart from the raspiness of her voice. Richie doesn’t talk about what’s happening, or ask how she’s feeling or tell her about how he feels, but he answers everyone one of her questions about the game and Eddie and what they’ve done on date nights. She slurps her orange juice and laughs clumsily and watches the two Tozier boys with gleaming eyes. It’s a good two hours before she fades and the nurses tell them that visiting hours are over.

Later, Richie is sat on the bed of his former childhood bedroom, turned guest bedroom, turned back into his bedroom for the time being. He alternates between slowly unpacking his bag and sitting staring at the wall trying to remember the posters that used to be there. He checks his phone and sees five missed calls from his boyfriend, but just holds his phone in his hands and looks at it. When it vibrates he answers it and matches Eddie’s frantic tones with a blank calmness of his own. He answers the questions about her status, thanks Eddie for his sincere statements on just how sorry he is and tells him not to worry about not being able to fly out for a few days because he understands how work is. His boyfriend tells him that he loves him and Richie says the same, before feigning tiredness and ending the call, so he can lie back and stare unsleeping at the ceiling and think about the glow stars that used to be up there.

***

Richie had always thought that at the end it would just be him and his parents alone in the hospital room, possibly surrounded by a pool of darkness and illuminated only by a single, flickering overhead bulb, the Three Toziers together for the last time, him and the only two non-imaginary/non-feline people he’d ever cared about. But it actually turned out there was an almost endless parade of visitors that came streaming through the door, their in-and-out times carefully tracked in Went’s little notebook. Richie can’t help but be resentful of them at first, greeting them tersely and then sitting in grumpy silence as they talk to Maggie, taking up the precious little time that he has with her and wasting it on these random nobodies that he’s never even heard of before.

It isn’t long though before he starts to grudgingly accept these invaders, not least out of admiration for their sheer numbers. With all the moving around they used to do Richie had assumed most of them would have been lost to the sands of changing addresses, but apparently not. Maggie may not even be entirely keen on them all – she talks enthusiastically (or at least listens enthusiastically) with some, joins in with Went’s polite small talk with others, and feigns sleep with the one who drones on and on about his old job designing concrete roofing tiles before miraculously waking up as soon as he leaves – but there sure are a lot of them. His mother has always been friendly with everyone she meets, able to charm and endear herself upon them in a matter of minutes. When Richie was young, and she probably thought he might make friends and it would therefore be a good idea to get to know the other moms at the school gate, she joined an endless series of book clubs and gossip circles (a few of them enjoyable, many of them ghastly). As he got older and more independent (sullen and withdrawn) she started shifting her job more regularly, some of the time to coincident with Went’s shifting job postings and the resultant move, but at other times simply because she felt like a change. She never stayed in one place long, before growing curious about doing something else and she decide to jump ship and dive into something entirely new. Richie had never been able to understand how she’d done that, seeing it only in a confusing hue of awe. He never knew how to just make friends like that, or how to be able to trust in yourself enough to just get a job doing something new rather than creeping out along the same safe route you already know. It was the Losers who befriended him, not the other way around, and it took weeks of painful heart-to-hearts with Dob before he took the job with _Clubhouse_. He wished he’d taken the chance to learn from Maggie while he had the chance.

***

It’s amazing how much empty time there is when you’re waiting in a hospital room with a woman who spends half the time asleep while you sit in vain hope that the next round of tests will come back with something encouraging this this time, even though you already know it won’t and everyone is avoiding saying out loud the thing you cannot say but know to be true – that you’re just counting down the hours till they die. Running down the clock like this gives you a lot of spare thinking time, and Richie finds himself returning to a couple of memories over and over again.

The first one is from when he must have been no more than six years old. Maggie looms huge in his mind, so much taller from his childish perspective than she really was (he never even realised his mum was short until he was ten). He remembers trudging slowly up the front steps, his feet looking blurry from the smudges on his glasses and the water swimming in his eyes. He pushes open the front door quietly, without making his usual exuberant greeting, intent on slipping quietly into his room, but evidently Maggie spots him anyway because he can hear the sound of her bustling around in the kitchen getting his post-school Pop Tart treat. 

“Hi Richie, how was your day – oh what happened honey?” she says, switching the tone of the voice as she emerges into the hall and crouches down, offering the Pop Tart as a greeting. Richie doesn’t take it, but sniffs heavily, rocks back and forth on his feet, unsure if he wants to tell her about his embarrassment. But the way she softly strokes his hair back from his forehead makes him start talking anyway.

“We were in class and Mrs Button said that we needed to make macaroni pictures of fish – again! That’s all she does mom, she just says to make a macaroni picture all the time and it’s sooo boring!” He gestures to the fridge, which is indeed coated in silver pasta tracings of stegosaurs and superheroes. “So I wanted to do something more fun, so I made me the macaroni fish. See!” He waves his arms around, just in case Maggie hasn’t noticed that they are completely covered in silver pasta shells shaped into little semi-circles in a crude imitation of scales, and turns around on the spot so she can see the paper fin he’d made and tied around his neck. “I liked it, and I thought she would too and the other kids as well! But…but…”

He breaks off then, his lower lip quivering. He’s not sure how to describe the look Mrs Button (or ‘Mrs Butt-face’ as he secretly called her in his head because she had a butt for a face) had given him, but it’s that same look of pained disappointment and the pinched little sigh that he’s come to expect from so many grown-ups. The rest of the class had been looking at him throughout, and he could have sworn that it was curiosity and jealously that they wore on their faces as he dunked the pasta in the glue and splotted it on his skin, giggling happily to himself. But after school ended, Henry, the big kid who looked older but was in their class for some reason, had come up to him in the playground and told him that he looked stupid because he was stupid and he was a fr-eak and all the other kids laughed and called him a fr-eak as well, and one of them had grabbed the papier-mache flipper on his right hand and had torn it open.

He doesn’t know how to say all of that, so he just waves his hand, showing Maggie the way the dangling flipper flops uselessly around and he knows that she understands because she always understands, even when no one else does.

She gives him a hug, a loose one so she doesn’t damage the fin, and kisses the top of his head. “Don’t worry Richie, we can fix it.” She disappears for a minute, before reappearing with some tape, and she helps him reassemble the broken flipper (and by ‘helps’ he means that she actually does it all, because it’s really hard to do craft repair on one hand while the other one is also completely covered in papier-mache). 

“See? All better. Now would you like to go for a swim in the sea?” she asks.

Richie gives her a funny look. “But you said when we moved to Nebraska that we were going to be really far from the sea.”

“Really? But isn’t the sea right behind you?” 

Richie looks where she is pointing, spins around and sees the living room carpet, a deep blue shag pile, and gasps. He dives into it enthusiastically and begins wiggling around like he’s swimming and cries out “I need to be in the sea because I’m a fish! I’m fish-Richie…I’m Fishchie!”

He hears his mother laugh behind him, and then say in a big scary voice “Well Fishchie, look out for sharks!” and she gets down on her hands and knees and begins snapping her teeth. Richie shrieks with delight and begins flapping his flippers and wriggling on his belly to get away from her as she chases after him, just missing with her bites every time.

Richie can’t remember just how long they played like this for, at some point Maggie was definitely a submarine and he had to hide from her beeps behind furniture, and later she put on a couple of jackets the wrong way so she had eight arms and he escaped her octopus tentacles. It must have been for a while because he looked up at one point to see that Went was home from work and had gotten his fishing rod in from the shed and was trying to catch him. They’d had dinner not long after, and Maggie had insisted that he had to take the flippers off then so he could hold a knife and fork because he wasn’t allowed to just dunk his face in the mashed potatoes like he wanted, but she had found a way to slip them off intact. She’d read him a story while peeling the scales off his arms to distract him from the sting, and washed them clean and tucked him into bed. The fins were left preserved on his bedside table. She had called him Fishchie the entire time and he fell asleep thinking about adventures under the sea and Henry screaming and wetting himself when a Kraken bites him clean in half. 

Once he’s done replaying that a few times, his brain normally shifts to the second memory. It’s from when he was twenty-one, was still living at home after having finished university. The marks from his final project were due to be released that week, and he’s spent pretty much the entire time staring at the student portal, spinning around in his chair, refreshing the page and spinning around again. His anxiousness has spread through the house and Maggie keeps popping her head round his bedroom door and asking quietly if there any updates on the hour, every hour. It’s just turned six when she pokes her way into the room once more to find Richie just staring at the page, face pale and jaw agape. She asks what’s going on and he just points at the screen – at the 98 sitting there in middle of the page in size-9 Arial. She lets out a whoop and tackles Richie into a hug, the force of which sends him spinning around on the chair and her scurrying behind to keep up. It has the effect at least of breaking his silence and he lets out a squeak, which turns into a laugh, which turns into a long drawn-out “fuuuuccckk” as his brain finally processes what just happened.

“Oh god, I am so proud of you baby” Maggie says, before standing up and yanking Richie out of the chair. “Come on, we’re going out to celebrate. Right now.” He grabs his things as she hurries him along and they dash out of the house, elated and laughing, and duck into the pub ten minutes down the road. Richie has a pint, Maggie a large glass of rose and they sit and chatter away to one another about the course and everything that Richie has done over the past four years. After that, they move onto the next pub and repeat the cycle. They’re on the third pub when Maggie asks whose face he’d most like to shove the 98 into.

He thinks for a moment into his beer before answering “Mrs Button. That haughty little way she’d look at me all the time, like she just knew I was never going to amount to anything.”

“I remember her looking like at parents evenings” Maggie nods with an eye roll. “Did I ever tell you I ended up working her a couple of years later?”

“What? No way!”

“Yeah she was at that office in Omaha, and I thought she might be stalking the family so she could tell you off again for the glitter accident, but it was just coincidence. Debbie Downer I called her, because she was called Deborah and she always looked at me like I’d just told her that her puppy was dead.”

“Oh. Sorry, she probably did that because she knew you were my mo and thought you might be the same” Richie says quietly.

“She did that because she was a miserable old hag” Maggie says dismissively and Richie snorts and almost chokes on his pretzel. 

“She had this habit of nodding like a bobble-head if someone in the office she liked said something, and then if I said that I agreed she’s stare at me and take a slow, noisy disapproving sip of tea. So one day I poured half a bottle of hot sauce into her tea when she wasn’t looking and sure enough, she took that judgemental slurp and she just made this face –“ Maggie purses her lips into a tight pucker, wrinkles her nose and closes her eyes and starts flapping her hands around her face and make this high-pitched whistling ‘ooooooh’ sound like an indignant kettle. 

Richie laughs and applauds. “I can’t believe you gave Mrs Butt-face even more of a butt-face” he says, and this time it’s Maggie’s turn to snort and spray rose across the table.

By the time of the sixth pub they’re both pretty drunk, but Richie had at least had something to eat earlier, some beans on toast hastily shovelled down in between refreshes, but poor Maggie skipped dinner altogether in order to get started on the celebration. She’s gotten very giggly and has started telling risqué stories about her early twenties that Richie never knew before and is delighted to find out about. But as they walk back she gets quieter. It’s only when they’re at home and in the light of the kitchen he can see how pale she’s gotten. He goes to offer her some water, but instead she dashes over to him, shoves him out of the way and hurls into the kitchen sink. Richie pats her back and brushes her hair back, gets her some water and a toothbrush (Went leaves them dotted around the house) and tells her that it’s alright and this happens to everyone. She’s mortified, and keeps saying how embarrassed she is, but he shushes her and tucks her into bed and thanks her for one of the best nights of his life and he means it.

As he cleans the sink he thinks about why he is actually quite enjoying pulling the smelly chunks out of the plughole, and realises that it’s because he just got to meet more of his mom that night. It seems dumb, but he’d always thought of her primarily as Mags, the woman he loves and always has an omniscient knowledge of what to do and say to make him feel better. He’d sort of forgotten that she was also Maggie Tozier, a real person in her own right, just as capable as anyone else of doing something embarrassing like drinking too much and chundering in the kitchen sink in front of your adult son. Both of these people exist in the same space and he got to spend time with both of them tonight, sometimes separately, sometimes blended together.

He likes them both very much.

He misses them though. Because that woman lying there, who talks little and sleeps a lot, that’s someone else. She resembles the other two, but her body is warped and someone has dug inside her brain and turned down the volume dial.

So Richie sits and watches and thinks about the Maggies that he used to know. 

***

Went is holding up a lot better than his son is. Unlike Maggie, he looks unchanged to Richie’s eyes, still ploughing on and working hard. He putters around the room with his collection of notebooks, some that were originally his wife’s and some new ones, making a note of every test, every word from a doctor or a nurse, what Maggie eats and doesn’t eat, who visits and for how long, detail after detail gets squirreled away in A5 pages. Richie can tell that his father it itching to transfer it all to a spreadsheet. He always has been a workaholic, someone whose desire to just keep driving through more and more hours, achievement after achieve+ment, increasing paycheques and quicker methods of pulling teeth ended up moving him and his family round the country. Eventually that wandering tapered off and he settled down in one place, but continued to rack up the projects and desperately put off the idea of even the floppiest of semi-retirements. So perhaps the pacing and the note taking is the best way he can channel that urge when stuck in a room with nothing to do between the sterility and the beeping.

But there’s something else there as well, in the way he and Maggie talk to one another, the rehearsed tone to the questions that he asks and the knowing looks that pass between his parents when the answer is delivered. He’s prepared for this. He’s practiced. Richie can’t imagine being able to do that – the idea of losing Eddie is something more than he can possibly comprehend, let alone be able to prep for. Even if they just broke up, that seems like something above and beyond what he would be able to cope with. He doesn’t have any experience with break-ups of course, but he’s heard Bill talk about a tumultuous storm of dumping from a girl named Audra in high school, and sometimes Bev mentions a Tom in passing, and the name causes everyone else’s face to turn to gritted stone. He knows that he is much too fragile to be able to weather such a thing, let alone the far more permanent, irretrievable loss that Went is staring resolutely in the face right now. Losing the person you feel more for than anyone else…

God. Richie hasn’t _felt_ anything for Eddie in days.

He hasn’t even really thought about him. He’s answered his text messages without paying any real attention, even sent a few memes on autopilot and he’s said blank words to him during their evening phone call every night. But it’s not the same thing as a few days ago.

Even right now as he sits there and thinks about his boyfriend, and knows how much he loves him, he cannot escape just how distant he is right now. It’s like he’s been removed, like someone has picked Eddie out of his place in the centre of Richie’s brain, and put him down somewhere far away. Eddie is indistinct and muffled behind the waterfall and Richie doesn’t like the fact that he doesn’t really feel like doing anything about that right now.

It’s like he’s reverted, regressed back to a time before _Clubhouse_ when his mom was the most important thing in his life.

With the power of hindsight, he realises that neither of his parents really understood him when he was a little kid. Or possibly not now either, but they certainly were flummoxed by their odd little boy. They never understood the jokes that he made up, nonsensical to an outsider but enough to send himself into a fit of high-pitched giggles (‘Why is a donkey like a tramp? Because bum’). They couldn’t get their heads around why he insisted on spending his time at kindergarten making these jokes over and over to every other kid in the class instead of just singing nursery rhymes with the rest of them, nor could they make sense of the fact that somehow their son wasn’t able to comprehend the link between this and the other kids not liking him. Went was always trying to find a way of fixing the issue, he read countless books on child psychology and got Richie tested for a variety of conditions. After the latest bout of bullying he’d hug his son better, and then sit him down with a hand on his shoulder and a ‘Now champ’ and propose some new way he might be able to make some friends. None of them worked, but it wasn’t for lack of trying on Went’s part. There had been a brief period in his early teens when Richie had come to resent this (‘You can’t tell me how to live my life! You’re not my real robot dad!’ he’d cry, before flouncing off to his room to paint his nails with eye shadow and listen to My Chemical Romance), but for the most part Richie appreciated it, for all it’s ineffectiveness. It came from a good place, and a belief that if he just worked hard enough he’d be able to find a way to help his son. The failures were never the fault of the strategist though, it was Richie’s execution that messed it up, of that he was sure. Richie didn’t know what Went had made of the fact that Richie had now made friends, even if it had taken twenty-seven years and he still didn’t know how he’d done it, but he hoped he was proud. 

Maggie had never taken that approach, she was the one who, while still puzzled by her strange child, seemed happy to keep him just the way he was. Richie adored this fact, and poured all his love and trust into his mom. He treasured the fact that no matter how many times the screw-up screwed-up she would be there to console his surprised Pikachu face afterward. Once he had a dream in which he was trapeze artists, swinging clumsily between greasy poles while a stretchy Maggie ran around beneath him, pulling her belly out flat like a trampoline ready to catch him. Even when he moved across the country and started a career in his passions and got a cat who he used to make imaginary friends, Skyping Maggie was still the best part of his week. And he knew she liked the times too, that she laughed at the jokes he messaged her and kept all of the random gifts he sent her. It might have taken him a while to get there, but he knew that he was paying back the love she had always given him.

But then he landed his dream job, got some friends and fell in love with a boy and he replaced her as the most important thing in the world to him without a second thought. So maybe that’s why the universe was doing what it was to her right now. 

***

It’s another two days before his boyfriend arrives at the hospital. He’s already apologised a million times for not being able to make it out sooner because of work, and Richie has already assured him a million and one times that it’s fine, but he already knows he’ll have to do it again soon anyway. When his pocket buzzes to tell him that Eddie has arrived, he makes it way down to the lobby to meet him, and he sees the man standing there, just inside the entrance, looking tiny. His feet are clinging desperately to the floor, but his knees keep twitching like they want to run away, he’s hunched in on himself and his head is ducked down, but it’s also sweeping back and forth trying to take everything into his wide eyes. When Richie approaches him, he leaps forward and embraces Richie in a crushing, but brief, hug, before snapping back into position with his arms wrapped around himself.

“Are you okay?” Richie asks cautiously.

Eddie huffs out a laugh. “Shit, you ask me if _I’m_ okay? When your mum is in here and-“ he slams his mouth shut again.

This doesn’t assuage Richie’s concern for him. “You look terrified.”

Eddie swallows heavily. “I know I told you I was over all the endless medical crap Sonia did when I was a kid. I thought I was. But just walking in here now, it’s all the same, the way it smells…sorry. Guess I’m not over it.”

Richie pulls him into another hug and lets Eddie bury his head into chest. He can feel his boyfriend’s arms attach themselves gratefully to Richie’s back before stiffening momentarily and then carding a hand through Richie’s hair. 

“You don’t have to be here if you think it’s going to be too much you know” Richie says softly. “You can turn around right now, it’s fine.”

“What? No, of course I’m not going to do that” Eddie exclaims, wrenching his head out of the embrace. “No I need to…I want to…” another swallow. “Let’s go.”

Richie takes his hand and steers him up the main stairs and then through his current favourite shortcut through the corridors. He asks Eddie about his flight and Eddie manages to fill up the five minute walk with a series of short, choppy sentences about the experience. When they get to the room Richie opens the door quietly and Eddie falls silent as they step inside. Richie glances down at the smaller man and can see his eyes dart frantically around the room – from the fluorescent light, to the hard chairs, to the little side table festooned with flowery cards and tubes of ointments, to the wires and tubes amassed around the head of the bed and looming over its tiny occupant like they’re ready to strike – and his nose wrinkles at the antiseptic smell and he shivers slightly. He mutters something under his breath, the only word that Richie catches is “Dad” and he doesn’t know what this is in reference to, perhaps Eddie just noting the fact that Went is out of the room right now. But then Maggie turns her head and creaks her eyes open and she bursts into a smile at the sight of the two of them.

“Oh Richie is that who I think it is? Have you finally brought me-“

“Yes Mags. This is Eddie Spaghetti” He grins and brings his boyfriend into a side hug, which ends shortly afterwards because said boyfriend jams an elbow into his ribs.

“Don’t call me that in front of your mother Richie!” he hisses, before composing himself and walking around Maggie’s bed and offering his hand out.

“Hi Mrs Tozier, it’s nice to meet you, and I wanted to say-“

“Nonsense, Eddie I’ve already told you to call me Maggie or Mags” she scolds playfully and feebly swats his hand away. “Now where is it?” she looks around for a moment, finds the control with a victorious “A-ha!” and presses the button to slowly push the bed up into a sitting position. She weakly lifts both her arms up and rests them on Eddie shoulders. He gives onc quick glance at Richie before leaning stiffly into the hug and placing his own hands awkwardly onto her bony back. 

She flumps back onto the bed and puts her hand out expectantly. Richie grabs her glasses off the side table and places them in her hand, she puts them on and peers through them at Eddie’s face. “Richie you never told me he was this handsome!”

“Mags…” Richie groans, face-palming and noticing Eddie turn pink as a flamingo. 

“No seriously, he didn’t look this good on the Skype-thingy.” She strokes Eddie’s cheek and considers something. “I’m just so proud you grew up to have such excellent taste.”

The door opens and Went enters, carrying coffee and a croissant. “Look Went,” Maggie says, “our son scored a hottie on his first time!”

Eddie, now the deep red of a bell pepper, stutters and walks stiffly over to Went and proffers his hand out again. “Hello Mr- Went, I’m Eddie, I’m the, er…”

“Yes, yes, no time for that now Went dear, you’ve already met him on the Web. Now I want to embarrass my son in front of his boyfriend while I can. Could you get the photo albums?”

Went opens their personal cupboard and pulls out a set of photo albums that Richie hadn’t noticed was in there, and starts laying them out in order on the bed. “Now, let’s see here…come on gather round, I need to show these off properly” Maggie says. Eddie moves to the point at the head of the bed where she is pointing and gives Richie a considerate look, which changes to one of barely-contained mirth as his eyes look down to the photo that Maggie is pointing at – one of a three-year old Richie, completely naked other than the tie he has fashioned for himself out of spaghetti.

“See this is from his naked phase” Maggie explains. “That’s all he would wear when he was in house.”

“And out of the house some of the time. Remember Anna’s christening?” Went interjects.

“Oh do I” his wife cackles. “Never did get a Christmas card from them again. But here I think he was trying to imitate his father’s tie, it was red you see.”

“So that explains the tomato sauce?” Eddie asks with a grin.

“Probably” Maggie smirks. She turns the page. “Ah, now this was a Halloween costume he made.”

“Is it some sort of worm? Barney maybe?” Eddie inquires with faux-politeness.

“It’s supposed to be Spyro” Richie groans.

“Then why are flames green?” Eddie questions, which gets laughter from all the other occupants of the room, including Richie and the nurse who has popped in to check the IV.

And so Maggie takes her new sort-of-son-in-law through each and every page, detailing the stories behind them all in excruciating detail, to Richie’s mortification and Eddie’s increasingly-hysterical delight. The one of his first set of glasses, eyes half-the-size of his head staring at the camera. Him at age twelve, questionable haircut and all, braces gleaming in the flash. A whole montage of different ‘cool’ outfits he constructed (mostly just different Hawaiian shirts). The emo phase he swore he would never tell Eddie about. She spends a good five minutes telling Eddie about his 17th birthday, and the grand total of three small glasses of champagne he was allowed to drink at dinner, and how this all led to the photo of him, passed-out and face-down on the sofa, party hat askew and drool dribbling onto the cushions. Eddie gigglesnorts at that story.

Richie is thoroughly embarrassed. His mother and boyfriend enjoy themselves immensely.

The last photo is one of the three Toziers taken about a year ago. Richie and Went were carrying Maggie lengthways, for reasons they’ve already forgotten. Went is grinning broadly at the camera, that same fixed smile he always wears while waiting for the camera’s timer to count down. Maggie’s face is ridiculous, caught between a smile and a shriek as Richie pretends to drop her. The three of them fall silent as they look at the picture. Richie can feel Eddie’s eyes on him, but he doesn’t know what the expression they are wearing means. 

When Richie, Eddie and Went get back to the Tozier family home that evening, Eddie offers to order them all takeaway as they must be tired. Went waves him off however, and insists on cooking. “He wants to show off his famous Dad chili” Richie whispers loudly in Eddie’s ear. As Went starts sorting ingredients and picking his ‘cooking jams playlist’, Richie and Eddie are left standing in the hall for a moment. Eddie reaches up and cups one hand around Richie’s cheek. He in turn places a hand over Eddie’s and rubs his thumb slowly back and forth. Eddie seems to be building up to something, but when he eventually opens his mouth, Richie grabs his other hand and drags him up the stairs.

“Come on Eds, I want to show you my old room. Well, it’s not really my old room anymore considering the rents made it a guest room, but look!” He opens the wardrobe and a bunch of his old junk spills out. “They kept it all!” He goes on to show his boyfriend all the cool stuff he had as a kid – Legos, his toy dinosaur, posters and so on – chattering away about them all the time. Eddie seems reluctant to join in at first, but after a few minutes starts commenting on everything, tossing out gentle digs about Richie’s taste in interior design, and joining in him in setting up an awesome dinosaurs versus spaceships diorama.

When Went calls them to dinner, they head down and join him for his famous (slightly above average) chili and beer. The conversation is casual, the news and old TV shows for the most part. Afterwards, Went grabs them some more beers and, presumably wanting to make this a male bonding night with his two boys, puts on _Starship Troopers_ followed by _Tremors_. Eddie joins in with their commentary throughout them both, and he and Went trade jokes back and forth about the merits of brain bugs versus phallic bugs. Richie notices that he is clutching his hand tighter than normal.

They all retire to bed afterwards. As they get undressed Richie can feel the size of his boyfriend’s gaze upon him and can hear the words hidden behind his silent lips. But before he does say anything he ushers them both underneath the covers and turns off the lights. As soon as he slips into bed, Eddie big spoons behind him and locks his arms securely around his chest. Richie picks up one of the hands and kisses it softly. “I was so proud of you today Eds. I can’t imagine how tough that must have been for you. Thank you. Love you.”

Eddie doesn’t say anything, but buries his nose into Richie’s hair. Richie thinks that maybe he cries. 

***

That’s pretty much their routine for the next five days, before Eddie flies home again, apologising over and over once more for the fact that he needs to get back to work because there’s major problems with playtesting feedback. Richie again tells him that’s fine and that he understands. Every time he does so Eddie gets that look, the one he kept using during the week. It’s the one he uses when wants to say something and is trying to work out the best way how (normally by cataloguing each and everything that’s wrong about a bad idea), but it seems deeper and more painful than it normally does. Every time the look starts to come to a conclusion, Richie cuts Eddie off by jumping in with a new topic of conversation and the look disappears for a little while.

Eddie leaves him with his work laptop so he can catch up a little on everything that he’s missed. Eddie, goddamn champion that he is, has been pulling his own and his boyfriend’s weight, but Richie knows how bad it is to keep dumping all of his responsibility onto Eddie and how much he is probably screwing over the project by not participating at all, so he answers email and participates in a few teleconferences. He keeps the camera off so no one can see the room he’s in. He hopes they can’t hear the beeps in the background. The Losers all ask how he’s doing in a casually sincere way at the start of the calls and he answers by telling them what he thinks about the latest problem with the game. They’ve all sent him individual messages as well, but he doesn’t reply to any of them, and only responds to posts in their work group chat.

He asked Eddie not to tell any of the other Losers about what’s happening, only that there is some sort of generic family emergency. Maybe they all figured it out anyway, they’re so smart. So much better at reading and understanding people than Richie is. Maybe they even chat about it amongst themselves. Maybe not. Richie remembers Eddie telling him that none of the Losers have good relationships with their parents, so perhaps they know what’s going on but can’t really understand, can’t really care. How could they know what this is like? They might read the signs correctly, but that doesn’t mean they get, deep down, how Richie feels right now. Eddie never had this sort of relationship with his mother either. 

He tries not to think these bitter thoughts, confident that they’re wrong. They keep cropping up anyway.

They don’t stop until the day finally comes where they have to shift Maggie from the hospital to the hospice across the road. Following the bed as it is wheeled along the underground corridor, Richie tries not to giggle to himself about the fact that the doctor said that they’re “in the endgame now”, because he can’t stop imagining Thanos in scrubs and a latex infinity gauntlet. He doesn’t know what it is about that particular moment brings the guilt come crashing down stronger than ever before, but something in it makes the shame just flood down that corridor and all he wants to do is sink to his knees and let it sweep him away. Instead he falls silent and lurches robotically after the trolley. It’s not as if he’s any stranger to guilt, he’s been feeling it for years but Eddie and the others have been gradually weaning him off it as of late. Perhaps they shouldn’t have.

Because here he is, thinking about what his friends think of him and his situation, when nothing that is happening right now is _his_ situation, it isn’t happening to _him_ is it? It’s not Richie lying there on that gurney, being wheeled down a breeze-block corridor to lie helpless in a room and wait to die is it? Maggie is the one whose life is coming to an end and all he is thinking about is how it affects himself. Like a child kicking and screaming and demanding that his mom pay attention to him and his hurts and fix all of his complaints right now, regardless of the far more terrible slog she is pushing through, despite knowing that the only end is something even worse. What a horrible, selfish, egotistical thing to do. And who can he blame that on? He used to sometimes think that perhaps all the other kids and teenagers and college students that were mean to him might be responsible for his self-importance. But that can’t be true anymore, not know that he has such treasured friends and such a beloved partner. Can’t blame the parents, not when he ~~has~~ ~~had~~ has the best mommy in the world. He must be a naturally despicable individual. Even now, he thinks about himself and what sort of person he is, and not about how much pain Maggie Tozier is facing and how hopeless her end is.

He asked how the universe could do such a thing, could give him more happiness than he had ever felt before, and then snatch it away and replace it with this. But it didn’t do anything of the sort to him, it did it to his mom.

Richie thought how cruel it was to have to see Maggie like this, not looking like herself anymore but instead some gaunt and puffy and quiet being he barely recognised. It wasn’t his voice being drained and scratched away though, or his eyes stitched up or his brain fogged with exhaustion. It was Maggie who had to feel her body betray her and know how little control she had over it shutting down and murdering her.

Richie complained about visitors taking up what little time he had left with her, but it was Mags who had to see these people, these friends and coworkers that she cared for, that had made her life better and know that this was the last time this was ever going to happen. Richie couldn’t manage the single goodbye he had to make, Maggie had hundreds to do.

He wished for more time to spend with her and find out more, to learn more about how she was able to do the things that she did. Yet she was the one who wasn’t going to be allowed to try that one last job before retirement that she always spoke of. Maggie wasn’t going to take up the painting and sculpture hobbies she wanted to when she finally ended work. Wasn’t going to travel to any of those places she and Went had pinned onto the map they kept in the kitchen. Or read any of the books or watch any of the shows that she had on her list. She would never play Richie’s new game. Or meet the Losers and find out what incredible people they were. If Richie and Eddie got married, she wouldn’t see it. Any of it. All of these experiences had been taken away and she was left with nothing.

Richie wanted more of his mom than just memories. She wouldn’t even have them.

***

The last few days are hard. The cancer has dragged Mags further in on herself. Her voice is rarely used, and scratchy to the point of nonsensical when it is. She sleeps a lot of the time. Even when she does drift lackadaisically into consciousness you can’t tell half of the time – her tear ducts have produced so much of the brown, dusty crust that forms when you sleep that she physically can’t prise her eyelids open anymore. 

In the cupboard in his former bedroom Richie found a box filled with notebooks and loose sheafs of paper of his childhood scribblings – doodles of vampire spacemen, and things that, for some reason, he thought were funny enough to write down for posterity. He sits by the side of the bed, deciphering his scrawled crayon and reading the silly nonsense jokes that he came up with at age 5 that he thought that would get him on TV – ‘If you go to a ham contest what will the man say? You won last year you are not allowed’ and ‘What do you call a tiger with glasses on? A scientist tiger’ and ‘What do you call a unicorn that goes to work? A wimp’ and ‘What do you get when you mix a t-rex and a chicken? Death’. Each one gets a muffled chuckle from his mother, and either a snort or an eye roll from his father. He reads her the stories he wrote, a whole series of disconnected adventures they as a family of dinosaurs had on his home planet (‘Planet Butter’) and described the illustrations he drew to accompany them (or tried to describe them at least, a lot of them were just confusing mixes of yellow and sauropods going ‘pew pew’ at smudges of reds). She smiles as she hears them and chips in with comments about half-memories of what they were doing when he came up with certain stories.

On the penultimate night a volunteer pushes around a drinks trolley, an actual alcoholic drinks cart, which is clearly a marvellous idea. On his mother’s grunted approval, Richie fetches her a gin and tonic. She can’t hold a glass anymore, or even tilt her head forward enough to take a sip, so he gets a plastic teaspoon and laboriously feeds it to her that way, pausing every time she hums in approval to wipe the flotsam booze off her chin. After a while she scratches out “What is this?”

“It’s a gin and tonic Mom” Richie replies hesitantly.

“I know that. But what is it?”

“Oh. It’s Gordons and Schweppes.”

“It thought I raised you better than that.”

“It’s all they had!”

“Hmm” she responds with a disproving growl, but the limps corners or her mouth twitch up in a smirk and Richie laughs, and gets back to the task at hand.

It’s only on the final day that she starts to feel any real pain. The lucidity has drained away completely by now, leaving behind only lost and hurt whimpers, which disappear as well once the nurses up the dosage. He and Went spend much of the day watching her, occasionally alternately stepping out of the room to stretch their legs. The hospice is an odd place to walk around – virtually silent, muted lights and whispered corridors, all the activity and decline hidden behind doors, individual cocoons and pain and pre-grief. Richie pokes his head into various communal rooms, most of them, like the chapel and the conservatory, pristinely empty. The day lounge has elderly relatives listlessly fixing jigsaws and confused grandchildren asking when they can go home, but other than that everything is silent and sealed up. After quarter of an hour or so, he returns to their individual room, a cave that they’ve someone managed to fill up in just a few days. It’s a campsite, with clothes and bags and cards and flowers and random knick-knacks from home, all centred around Maggie’s bed.

Ostentatiously they both take shifts that night, so one is supposedly sleeping while the other is keeping watch. In reality they both fall into a haze between dozing and blinkingly staring at the quietest occupant of the room. It’s about five in the morning when they both jerk awake, woken by the sudden absence of laboured breathing. She makes one last odd-sounding gulping exhale, like she has just broken the surface and is gasping for breath while simultaneously being punched in the stomach, and then that’s it. 

Richie stays sat there as Went gets up and checks that she really has stopped breathing. He presses a button and a nurse comes and confirms it, before getting a senior nurse who calls it. There isn’t really anything else to do now. The staff is very nice about it and nobody pushes, but they all know that they’re going to need the room for someone else and it would be appreciated if the Toziers can clear out soon. So they break camp and pack up their gear. Richie waits in the corridor while Went says something to his now ex-wife and then follows his invitation to swap places.

He stands at the foot of the bed and has nothing to say. Over the past weeks he thought he hadn’t seen his mother, not really, because she’d been replaced with something else. But there were always glimpses of her, peeking out from behind the gaunt façade. Not now though, the body that lies before him is a vacuum, devoid of Maggie in every way.

Richie thinks about saying something to this cold sack of meat. Maybe apologising for thinking about himself rather than her during all this time, or for not helping more or not calling and visiting more, for abandoning her, but she couldn’t hear that anymore. Perhaps he should think about her and the life that she led and everything that she did and touched and lightened. Or what she meant to him, that she was the most important thing in the world and he never clearly told her that. There were memories he could talk about, but memories were meaningless when their subject didn’t exist anymore. He could say that he ~~hoped~~ ~~knew~~ hoped that she was proud of him, of his work and his friends and his Eddie. But she wasn’t proud anymore.

Maggie Tozier – all that she was, all that she could be, everything she ever did and everything she represented – didn’t exist anymore.

He picked up his jacket, turned away from the body and left the room without a word.

She was dead.

There wasn’t anything else to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember kids, fanfiction is cheaper than therapy.
> 
> Content warnings - cancer, body horror and death.


	12. Beta

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie tries to move on from his loss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for the long ass wait, this chapter absolutely kicked my ass.
> 
> But there is a little more smut at least.

Richie is huddled in his office, snowed under by work. Eddie has been positively heroic with picking up Richie’s slack during his absence and he’s only just come to realise quite how much the other Losers covered for him. Nevertheless, there were definitely parts they hadn’t been able to complete during his unintentional vacation – they had hired him for a reason after all – and he’d come back to find a pretty healthy list of issues that Ed and Larry had assembled for him. Add in the guilt of leaving them to deal with his work as well as their own, and now he was fervently trying to scrub away his shame by packing in the unpaid overtime to make sure he paid back the hefty debt that he’d accumulated. He couldn’t speak for all of the staff of course, but the Losers had least had all been pretty clear that they didn’t blame Richie for his disappearance and that they were only too happy to take on his duties during his absence. And he knew this was true to some extent, they were his friends after all, and that’s what friends did for one another (he’d learnt that in a book about Finny the Fish Learning How to Make Fishy Friends that he’d poured over as a kid). But they were also his coworkers and no coworker ever liked getting stiffed over by the colleague who shirked his duty, so Richie had to pay them back sharpish. He liked these people, no need to make them be overworked because of something that wasn’t their fault.

Besides, after all that time with nothing to do and everything to think about, it was nice to have so much to do and no time for thinking. Even the funeral planning was too active to allow him to dwell on everything that happened. He never would have guessed that funerals took that much work, especially because Maggie had left clear notes and an eclectic Pinterest page on what she wanted, but apparently this is how it is. So he splits his time between his job and the planning, dedicating one desk to each task, and hurtles back and forth across the room on his spindly chair when he switches from to the other. He finishes a Skype call with the sound guys just in time to launch himself back from the work desk so he can talk to the flower people on his funeral laptop, while desperately googling what a marigold is so he doesn’t sound too much like an idiot.

He and Went are keeping in touch regularly about the planning. The old man has even learnt how to use WhatsApp. It’s positively inspiring. Eddie offered to help, a few times actually, but Richie has politely turned him down each time. It was a couple of nights after Deathday when his boyfriend confessed that he remembered hating how impersonal his own father’s funeral had seemed to him, how his childish eyes had desperately looked for something that reminded him of the dad he’d barely gotten to know, and instead only got to see bland words about being at peace and heard only pastel-coloured prayer and platitudes. Helping plan the deeply personal and idiosyncratic funeral that the Toziers wanted for a woman he also had barely gotten to know would be heartbreaking for the poor guy, so Richie had made sure the job was off of Eddie’s roster.

It did mean that he wasn’t getting to spend much time with his partner though. He made a mental note to find a way to make it up to Eddie, and opened up a new browser window and began populating tabs with special date and present ideas.

But it seems when you speak of sexy munchkin devils they appear, for Richie hears a knock and looks up to see some spaghetti standing in his doorway.

“Hey Eds!” he chirps.

“Hey Chee” Eddie responds, walking over to bend down and hug him from behind. Richie quickly Alt-Tabs away from the gift window, but ends up on the funeral window and so closes the laptop lid instead, before turning his head and nuzzling into his boyfriend’s embrace. 

“You doing okay?” Eddie asks from beside Richie’s neck.

“Yeah, we managed to fix the issue with the dialogue and the foley not syncing, and I’m making progress on the lighting glitches and I was hoping to have a look at some of the new quicktime suggestions this afternoon…”

Eddie stays still as Richie lists off his jobs and tells his coworker just how much progress he’s making, before finally interrupting him with a kiss on the lips and an invite to join him for lunch.

Richie bites his lip, tempted, but says “Sorry Eds, too much to do today. Going to be eating at my desk I think.”

“Do you want me to grab you something?”

Richie hesitates, but, persuaded by the fingers running through his hair, agrees that maybe Eddie could pick him up a pastrami bagel and some fruit if Eddie is going that way.

“Sure” Eddie agrees, and he goes to move away, but Richie pulls him back and declares that maybe he should just eat him instead, licking up Eddie’s throat and eliciting a giggling shriek. Eddie swats him on the back of his head and goes out to grab their respective lunches. Richie half-notes him lurking in the doorway for a few seconds watching him, but he’s too busy getting back to his email to the crematorium to really pay it any attention. 

***

For all its complications, the planning was evidentially worth it as the funeral goes off without a hitch. Maggie had always insisted that her funeral be fun rather than dour and this is exactly what she gets. Went’s speech is festooned with Dad puns (“this is a _fun_ eral” appears twice), Richie tells a litany of anecdotes about his mother’s many ridiculous moments, and he has to pause for laughter so many times that they almost end up running over their time slot. Both of them had selected a roll of silly photos that played on repeat throughout. The mood continues during the wake at the nearby bar that they’d booked, a classy establishment with cash behind the bar and a selection of nibbles and fancy sliders laid out and refreshed at regular intervals. Anyone peering in through the window would never have guessed it was a wake going on inside judging by the volume of the laughter, and the bar staff seem pleasantly surprised by the tempo and the 80s soundtrack playing. 

Richie does regret that he doesn’t get to spend much time with Eddie, who looks a little lost not knowing anyone there, but does a much better job at blending in than Richie ever did at those few college parties he tried attending only to end up not talking to anyone and scurrying out quietly after less than half an hour. But he never gets much chance to back him up or introduce him to anyone because he’s too busy running around. Maggie had carefully planned which knick-knacks, pictures and decorations were to go to each person and they had brought them all down to the pub to distribute out. Went stood by the table checking items off one by one on his spreadsheet, while Richie ducked and weaved through the crowd to hunt down the recipients, often just going by Went’s vague descriptions of what they looked like to try and identify his target (“The duck woman. You know, the one with the hair”), and more often than not getting waylaid by someone who wants to express sympathy at the situation. 

Even once the list is complete, he ends up having to circulate around, getting dragged from one mingle to another to talk to someone who wants to relive a particular memory. He and his dad have only just finished describing the time Went fell asleep during Christmas dinner after a 12-hour shift and too many sherries, only to be awoken suddenly by his wife and child competing to throw brussels sprouts into his snoring mouth, when Richie gets ushered over to another group so he can re-do his impression of Maggie doing an impression of Mrs Buttface eating the hot sauce for those who missed it earlier.

It’s odd how much Richie is enjoying the company of these people, some of whom he knows and some of whom are strangers, when just a few weeks ago he blazingly resented them for taking up valuable hospital visiting hours and wasting the precious little time he had left with his mom. But now he wants to soak in everything they have to say, every comment, story and anecdote about Maggie reveals a whole new angle to her that he never knew about before. He’d loved finding out more about her as he grew up and despised the fact that he hadn’t made more effort at the time, and now he was being drenched in tales of Maggies he never met – a woman who brought a book group to a state of civil war with her impassioned rants about Charles Dickens – and he wants to capture it all. It’s like every person there is bringing their own collection of Lego bricks and they’re all building up a crazy, higgledy-piggledy sculpture of Mags in the centre of the bar together.

By the time it’s all over and everyone has left and it’s all packed up, Richie is a little drunk and pleasantly overwhelmed. He slumps over in the back of the taxi, leaning on Eddie and humming pleasantly as Eddie plays with his hair and tells him about everyone he met.

“I know this is a weird time to say this, but you were good tonight Chee. Really good. Have you…” Eddie hesitates a moment. “Have you ever thought about doing stand-up?”

Richie sits up to better goggle at his boyfriend.

“You’re kidding me right?” he asks rhetorically. “I mean yeah I can joke around with the Losers now, but you remember what I was like when I first met you all? I could barely talk to you, let alone do a…routine or something!”

“Half of the people in there were strangers to you. Didn’t stop you. And that’s a funeral crowd, I can’t imagine that makes for the easiest set, but you had them eating out of the palm of your hand. You’re good with an audience.”

Huh.

Richie hadn’t thought of them like that, but Eddie, as usual, was right. He had enjoyed playing the audience and making them laugh.

Maggie really was impressive. She was helping Richie out even at her own bloody funeral. 

A few minutes later they arrive back at the house, and the three lightly inebriated men, two Toziers and a Kaspbrak, spill out of the taxi and up the porch steps. Went gets the door and stumbles over the mail lying on the door mat. He picks it up with a grunt and heads down the hall, while Eddie and Richie peel off into the kitchen. They’re halfway through an argument about which snack would be best right now when they hear the sound of sobbing, and follow it to Went’s office, finding him standing and staring at the new letters he’s dumped onto the top of an enormous pile of documents. He’s always been a tall man, taller still than Richie, but right now he looks like a crumbling mountain. His back jerks up and down to the tune of arhythmic wet sobs, his head hangs down and the grief landslides off him and pools at his feet.

“Hey, hey Dad it’s okay” Richie says softly. The older man doesn’t reply but lets his son guide him into the living room and deposit him gently into his armchair. Eddie watches anxiously, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He steps forward and goes to place a hand on Went’s back, before stopping and hovering for a moment and then scuttling into the kitchen with a muttered mention of making some tea.

Richie sits on the arm of the chair, squeezing his father’s shoulder and letting him weep into his hands for a few minutes, not wanting to push him.

“It’s all just so goddamn much,” Went eventually chokes out. “I said I could do it, I knew I could do it, but I just can’t.”

Richie glances up to see Eddie holding a cup of tea and wiggling a bottle of brandy next to it questioningly. Richie nods and returns to his dad.

“I know I’m supposed to be good at paperwork and everything, but it’s so much to do. The will, the bank accounts, the inheritance tax, the internet was in her name, the bloody car insurance, I…just want it to end. And every time I have a question I go to poke my head around the door and ask her and she’s just not there.”

Eddie places the spiked tea down on the table and retreats back out of sight. Went snatches the tea up and drains half the cup in one gulp.

“But at the same time that she’s not here, she’s _here_ you know. I can’t look at anything or touch anything without finding her there. She left but she’s lingering. The whole house is soaked in her, it’s fucking dripping in her.”

He sobs and slurps his tea.

Richie makes eye contact with Eddie, breathes deeply and looks back at Went.

“You need to be able to compartmentalise Dad” he says, the words feeling easy. “Get out of the house. It’s not forgetting her to live somewhere else. It’s just about being able to manage yourself.”

Went nods waveringly.

“And come on old man, you’re a freaking expert at moving house by now. You should present a show about it.”

A snort. “Yeah I know. But I don’t have the time, I’ve got all of _that_ to sort out” Went says with a vague gesture back to the office. He finishes the tea, and Eddie slips out to get another one. 

“I’ll do it” Richie says, and he means it. Went’s head snaps up to stare. “I’m serious. The paperwork, the accounts, the lot of it. You just focus on moving house and learning to you know…carry on.”

Went wavers. Tempted. 

“It’s alright Dad. It’s my turn now. I’ve got this.”

He opens his arms and Went leans slowly forward. Richie wraps his arms around his back and brings him close, scratching up and down, while Went cries and soaks Richie shirt. Richie doesn’t mind. He just holds the smaller man close and talks him through it. 

***

It was a couple of days after the funeral and Eddie and Richie were over at Eddie’s place, lying on his bed and half watching YouTube on his laptop and half just hanging out and smooching. They talk intermittently, but quite a lot of their communication is non-verbal, their looks and touches tell each other what they want to know. Eddie Kaspbrak has a whole lexicon of cues and Richie has the privilege of getting to know them all. Right now he has the lowered eyes and pursed lips of when he’s trying to build up to say something he’s nervous about actually verbalising. It’s something he’s been doing a lot right now, half the time he’s vibrating with a quivery energy like a Duracell bunny with a battery up its ass (and while they have been experimenting more the in the bedroom as of late they haven’t got to that stage yet).

Eventually Eddie makes the little huffed intake of breath that means _here I go_ , before leaning over and pecking Richie on the lips, his way of saying _I need a little more confidence to do this, please give it to me_ , a habit always makes Richie’s heart sing, and says out loud “Hey Chee I understand if you don’t want to, or if you want to talk to someone else about it instead of me, but I was thinking because it’s been a little time, and I wanted to give you time, and please tell me if you want some more or anything, but because the um, funeral, has happened now, and if that maybe made a difference…”

He’s not looking at Richie’s face as he says this, but rather at his hands as he plays with his fingers, communicating that _I’m thinking right now, but it’s you I’m thinking of_ , and eventually manages to say with his mouth “…if you wanted to talk about your mom at all?”

Richie gives his most neutral shrug in response.

Eddie hangs for a moment, just looking at him, before speaking again. “I know I’ve never had a relationship with my mother like you did with Maggie, I guess maybe I did with my dad,” his eyes flick away for a moment and then back again, “I don’t really remember. But I know how much she meant to you…”

Richie doesn’t communicate back, verbally or otherwise.

“You haven’t talked about it all, not really. Just about the practicalities of the funeral and such. Whenever I try and ask you about _it_ you just deflect and change the subject.”

“No I don’t” Richie says automatically.

Eddie’s eyebrow quirks. _We both know that’s not true_.

“I think it would help if you did talk about her and I want to help. You know that.”

“There’s nothing really to talk about is there?” Richie says neutrally, without bitterness.

Eddie looks at him in the way that says _you’re being an idiot right now but I love you and I can tell this is important to you so I’m not going to say you’re an idiot, but I am going to think it and look at you like this so you know that’s what I’m thinking_.

“I mean I knew it was coming for years, it was just a matter of time” Richie continues. Eddie cards his fingers through Richie’s hair to show _I want to comfort you_ , but he doesn’t look satisfied. Richie’s throat feels heavy. “And it’s not true thay I haven’t spoken about it all. Me and Went have talked.”

“You said that you only talked about logistics with him” Eddie states, maintaining eye contact.

“Yeah but you saw after the wake –“

“That was him talking to you. Not the other way around.”

“Yeah, but it’s whatever. Still talking right?” Richie can feel his eyes begin to prickle. He needs to shut this down right now.

“I mean thanks for the offer and everything Eddie, but you know she’s dead right? And until I learn necromancy, nothing I’m going to say is going to change that. So I guess I’ve got nothing to say. That alright with you?”

Eddie doesn’t nod, but he does lean over and place a slow kiss on Richie’s forehead, a gesture that means something more than can be expressed in words. When he pulls back however, his shoulders have not dropped the way they do when he’s content with an outcome.

Richie needs out. Now.

“Speaking of necromancy, I’ve got to drain the lizard” he says. He does catch the slightest crack of a smile on Eddie’s face as he slips off the bed and pads to the bathroom. 

“How the fuck is that related to raising the dead?” Eddie calls after him.

“I dunno, sounds ritualey doesn’t it, blood-letting a lizard? I just make the jokes babe, you’re the one who decides to laugh at them.”

“I wasn’t laughing!”

“You were thinking about it!”

Richie closes the bathroom door behind him, and strides quickly and quietly over to the sink and turns the taps on full blast. Only then does he stop chuckling and let out a single, loud wet sob. He lets the water flow as he leans his back against the wall and slides down the floor, white-knuckling his knees. He’s not going to cry.

He’s not going to.

Not a single fucking tear.

He can’t do that that to Eddie.

The Eddie who never got any real chance to know his father before losing him to cancer and the forgetting of childhood memories. The man whose mother was an abusive, clutching woman who gave her son only the most warped version of love imaginable. A guy whose friends all have similarly problematic and unhealthy parental relationships.

And what is Richie going to do? Parade his own grief in front of a man like that, to claim that woe is him because he had the best mother imaginable for _only_ twenty-seven straight years? As if that is somehow worse than never having a real mother at all? He’s already probably upset Eddie with all the talk of funerals when Frank’s is clearly a traumatic issue for him. His boyfriend does the most incredible job of keeping his maternal trauma segregated away and dealt with, Richie is not about to start unboxing all of that imprisoned shit just because he wants to have a little cry.

Maybe Eddie will want to mourn Maggie with Richie, at least a little bit. He was certainly fond of her. But he’s not going to grieve the way Richie wants to. Richie wants to curl into a ball and weep until he’s a dried-out husk, he wants to talk about her all the time, he wants to never think about her again, he wants to catalogue every memory he has of her and record them and track down the memories of others and write a biography of her, he wants to drink until he doesn’t even remember having a mother anymore, he wants to scream. Sometimes he wants to bring her back as an imaginary friend like he did with Dobbin, at other times he wishes to leave all of that behind and just move on.

He knows Eddie cares about him, that he loves him and is _in love with him_. He’s stopped obsessing over keeping his debt in check and no longer thinks that the fact that Eddie has had to support him more times than he has had to support Eddie is super important. But Eddie never signed up for this, never indicated that he wants to spend all of time babysitting a full-grown man who does nothing but cry about someone that doesn’t even fucking exist anymore. Eddie has told Richie that he’s a ‘lovable idiot’, that he’s ‘surprisingly good at sex for someone who’s never done it before’ and that Eddie has never ‘enjoyed or craved anyone’s company more’. Not once did he say he wants to be an unpaid therapist. The man wants to be Richie’s boyfriend, not his goddamn emotional support dog.

Of course Eddie has never said that, out loud or via his non-verbal codebook, because why would he? He’s much too much of a good person for that, and never going to even hint to Richie at what a burden he would be. And he wouldn’t leave Richie even if the taller man did break down in front of him. The poor bastard would spend the rest of his life caring for the man he loves, even if did involve tying his legs to a dead weight of a human being and jumping into second-hand misery. 

So Richie stood up, checked his face in the mirror, turned off the taps and left the room and told his boyfriend a joke about a man who had sex with dogs and all he saw on Eddie’s face was disgusted amusement and not a trace of obligated pity. 

***

Richie had entirely intended, and believed in, the confidence in his voice when he told Went that he could handle the paperwork. However when faced the grim papery reality, it turned out he could not, in fact, handle it. Like at all. 

There was just so much of it, all of it different from one another and all the various organisations required a different complex set of formulae of boxes and forms to be fulfilled before they would accept that yes, the woman who had cancer and then stopped breathing for several days before being incinerated into a pile of ash was in fact dead, and that Richie wasn’t in fact pretending so he could cancel his mother’s driving licence for shits and giggles. One bank account required this, another account required that. Death certificates were worth their weight in gold, photocopied ones were worth only silver. Some places wanted phone calls, others emails or maybe a clunky online portal while a surprising amount still wanted actual paper forms to be filled out in black ink and posted off, like it was the goddamn 19th century or something and Richie was labouring away by the light of a single candle, trying to complete the accounts by nightfall so his cruel master might bless him and let him return home for Christmas morn and feed his family of urchins the skinniest goose in the shop. 

Maybe he had bitten off more than he could chew, considering this workload defeated the spreadsheet king while Richie was a disorganised mess who only had the faintest clue of what a pension even was (it was when you were old and they count the wrinkles on your face and give you money depending on how many you have isn’t it?). His living room floor was carpeted in paper, account cards, address books and pens, all of which Dobbin apparently thought would make a satisfying bed. Half of his time was spent shifting the cat from one pile to another, the rest was spent blowing fur off paper and trying to translate the dense and mysterious legalese everything was written in. 

The doorbell rang just when Richie was swearing at a particularly incomprehensible inheritance tax page, which only served to lower his mood further. Normally of course he would be delighted at a surprise visit from Eddie, but he couldn’t exactly show his boyfriend the number of problems he was having with the admin from his dead and beloved mother now could he? Maybe they could go out instead, a little bit of kicking the can down the road in favour of going to the movie theatre sounded pretty tempting. 

So he padded to the door, still staring at page 17 of IHT400 and trying to comprehend what the hell they meant by _assets that can be nominated in this way are deposits of up to $5,000 in friendly societies and industrial and provident societies or, before 1 March 1981_. He’s muttering under his breath, “What’s a friendly society? Canada? Can I call Canada industrial when they have so many trees? Are Canadians provident? I don’t fucking know”, when he wrenches open the door without looking, says a quick “Hey babe”, pecks Eddie on the lips and walks back into the living room all without looking up from the paper.

It’s only when he goes to sit back down that his brain registers just how scratchy Eddie’s upper lip was, which is odd because A. Eddie is almost as bad at growing facial hair as he is and B. Eddie was decidedly clean-shaven when he last saw him at work 2 hours ago.

He turns around and sees Stan standing in the doorway and staring at him. “You’re a terrible kisser” he deadpans.

“What!” Richie squawks. “I’m a magnificent kisser Staniel the Maniel! Clearly the kiss must have been so good it scrambled your brain.”

Stan doesn’t deem that worthy of a response and steps into Richie’s flat. Dobbin comes over to examine this strange new offering Richie has bought him. Stan crouches down to examine the cat, Dob puts out his paw in his way that means _bring your hand closer so I can grab it and tug it to my face so I can rub against it and decide whether or not I like you_. Stan instead takes the paw and shakes it, before standing back up and casting a critical eye over the paper maelstrom that is the floor. Dobbin looks decidedly bemused and waltzes off to the bedroom.

“Um…not that I don’t love a visit from my favourite avian lover, but er, what are you doing here?” Richie asks.

“Eddie said you had a ton of paperwork and were struggling with it, so I’m here to help.”

Richie is torn. On the one hand he’s touched, on the other he doesn’t want to just relegate everything he avoided dumping onto Eddie onto poor Stan instead. Then again he does really need the assistance. He’s still not sure about Stan knowing about everything, but at the same time he’s already witnessed Richie disappear from work for several weeks for unspecified personal reasons and is now standing in front of a bunch of forms all talking about the death of a woman named Margaret Tozier and it’s not as if Stan is an idiot (actually he’s very smart, but don’t tell him Richie said that), so the proverbial feline is probably out of the sack by now.

He looks into Stan’s eyes and sees serenity and empathy hidden behind the coolness.

“Thanks Stan, that would be great” he says, his voice cracking only slightly.

The other man nods. “No problem. Besides, I’m the emperor of spreadsheets and I like a challenge. Now, what are all the different piles here?”

“Um…” Richie tries to remember how he originally planned to lay out the barely-organised chaos but Stan cuts him off before he can make up an answer.

“Never mind, let’s start again. Floor filing systems are fine, but you need to divide it up.” He pulls several rolls of differently-coloured tape out of his bag. “So let’s mark it out first. Also you need to keep the pet off of the work. Get a cat bed for him so he stays in there.”

“Stan you do know that no cat ever actually uses the cat beds you buy for them right?”

“Birds have always used the bird houses I get.”

“Hate to break it to you Stan but there are actually other animals in the world other than birds.”

“Blasphemer” Stan says with a smirk, before getting to work.

Stan does turn out to be a godsend. He explains what a lot of the language means, refers back to what he did when he had to do all of this for a grandfather a couple of years ago, makes sense of what money was held in which account, organises the forms, makes a schedule of what needs to be done and when, and helps Richie pull his administrative bacon out of the fire. They’ve been going for an hour when Stan finally asks “So have you spoken to anyone about this?”

“Um Stan we’ve literally been talking about this since you got here.”

“I meant personally. It’s not good for your mental health to just not discuss it at all.”

“What? Little old me? Why, I’m happy as a clam!” Richie cries, urgently diverting power to the forward deflector shields. “But why are clams supposed to be the happy shellfish? Are they smiling behind their shells, even though they don’t have lips? And what about all the other fruits de mer? It must be pretty demoralising to be a lobster and be told you have to spend the rest of your life as morose as a prawn just because the clams are hogging all the joy. And…”

“You should talk to someone.”

“I…just did. I did a whole bit about shellfish 3 seconds ago, didn’t you hear it?”

“Probably not to me. You should talk to Eddie or a therapist.”

Richie makes a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat, and turns back to his calculations. There’s silence for a solid minute before Stan speaks again. “Did I tell you me and Patty almost broke up once?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It was before I met you. We’d been together about 6 months, and I had this problem where every time I’d talk to my father on the phone, I’d have nightmares that night and wake up Patty.”

“You were sharing a bed with an unmarried woman!” Richie exclaims, scandalised. “Why Stanthony you absolute hussy, how could you-“

Stan ignores him and carries on. “They were pretty intense. I’d wake up screaming and see Patty there, white as a sheet and staring at me. But whenever she asked about them, I’d just apologise for waking her and tell her she should go back to sleep, while I’d go and spend the rest of the night on the sofa trying not to hyperventilate. Then one night, I actually hit her in my sleep because I was trying to get away from…” Stan swallows heavily and his pristine face cracks slightly. “…doesn’t matter. But the point is when I woke up, Patty gave me an ultimatum.”

“Yeah?” Richie asks quietly.

“She told me that I had three options – to talk to her, to get some professional help or to break up. And the reason she told me she was doing this wasn’t because I hit her while unconscious, or because I kept waking her up, but because she loved me. All of me. She loved my, quote, ‘dumb bird habit’, and my ‘incredibly complex way of organising a sock drawer’ and ‘all of my shit’. But that wouldn’t work when I was hiding part of myself, even if it was a part that I thought she wouldn’t like. That love meant she didn’t want me to be in pain, but the only way out of the pain was to start unpacking it. I told her everything that night. Took a while longer for her to persuade me to give therapy a go, but I got there in the end. And she was right. As always. She pulled me out and she did it because she wanted to.”

Stan looks up from the spreadsheet he’s been making for first time since he started that little speech. “Anyway. Just something to chew on.”

Richie nods and makes an indeterminate sound.

“Well I think we’ve made good progress today” Stan says. “I’ve put an appointment in your calendar to carry on Thursday evening.” He gestures to Richie phone. “Try and call the gas company before then if you can.”

He stands up, looks over at Richie once and gives him one of his patented tiny meaningful smiles, before scratching Dobbin once behind the ear and leaving without another word.

Richie sits there and thinks.

***  
That weekend Bill and Mike insist on taking Richie on a night out, in what they call ‘The Night the Three Sexiest Losers Hit the Clubs’. Richie says the label in inaccurate, and in fact his cute, twunk ball of feistiness of a boyfriend should be the third member, but Eddie insists that Richie should go. So he meets them at the first bar, has a couple of rounds and participates in a long conversation about video games. He follows them to the second bar, has another two rounds and a detailed discussion of preferred blowjob techniques (he makes some notes on his phone). He’s delighted by their suggestion of booking a booth at a karaoke bar, and he buys them shots while they wait for their slot. The shots turn into karaoke, which turns into shots-while-singing, which turns into a ruthless karaoke tournament to the death. Bill and Mike celebrate their victory by making out for a good five minutes straight while Richie stands to the side and awards them both points out of ten (derived from a mean average of their scores in technique, passion and total-obliviousness-to-their-surroundings). One more round of shots later and they hit the dance floor. 

Richie has never, and probably never will be, a good dancer but he enjoys himself nevertheless. He moves in a weird, jerky manner with only the barest of connections to the song’s rhythm, a lot of the time is spent bouncing on his feet with his eyes closed and he struggles to resists the desire to rip of his shirt and jump around the crowd like he was alone in his apartment. But none of that really matters.

Because right now he feels free, for the first since he answered that call from Went.

Everything that had been weighing him down – the sadness, the guilt, the paperwork, the backlog at work, the efforts t desperately try to keep his feelings isolated and segregated so they couldn’t contaminate Eddie – all of those things that have been sitting in the bottom of his belly and pushing him down to the floor, have been left behind. He’s untethered, he’s cut his line and left all of the ballast behind on the ground, while he floats up and up, bouncing randomly from carefree cloud to carefree cloud. Right then and there - his body moving rhythmically, the alcohol coursing through his veins and his sweaty arms clasped around the shoulders of his friends and they dance as a manic trio to The Offspring – he feels freer than he has in months. The inside of his body has been power washed free of sludge and he is empty and light.

At some unknown early hour of the morning the trio do eventually call it a night and pile into an Uber. Richie is dropped off first, and after five minutes of the three of them saying goodbye and professing their undying love for one another (quite unaware of the increasingly irksome looks from the driver), Richie lets himself into Eddie’s house. He finds his boyfriend asleep on the sofa, Netflix still auto-playing in the background, and wakes him up gently, so he can tell him all about karaoke and dancing and Bill and Mike’s respective hickey preferences. Eddie listens and laughs to it all, forcing Richie to drink water between each anecdote, before shoving him in the shower quickly to ensure the club sweat goes down the drain and not onto his sheets. Richie kisses him goodnight, lays down on the bed and falls asleep before his head hits the pillow with a sound of flumpy release. 

When he wakes up everything is the same, but shifted. Thanks to Eddie’s medical-grade ministrations he’s mercifully free of a hangover, but everything else feels wrong. He’s not so much empty anymore as he is _hollow_. The lightness no longer makes him feel free, it makes him feel weak and insubstantial. He clings to the mattress till his knuckles are white, and the bed drifts like an untethered raft that he fears is going to float him away into nothingness. The feel of Eddie’s fingers, curled lightly between his shoulder blades, is the only lifeline he can find and he grabs onto it fervently. 

His throat is growing lumpy, his lungs are quickening and he tries to clamp his eyelids down harder to stop the tears escaping. He knows he should slip out of bed and go to the bathroom to hide the signs from Eddie, but he can’t get over the fear of what will happen if he does so, that if he breaks the connection now he’ll drift and sink forever. That doesn’t stop him from kicking himself as he feels his partner begin to stir behind him, because he was too much of an uncontrolled coward to just keep quiet and not wake Eddie up. 

Eddie places a kiss on the back of Richie’s neck, makes a low humming sound, and wraps his arm around Richie’s chest, pulling him close. The taller man knows that Eddie will be able to feel his heart beating rapidly and his chest undulating up and down in panic against his arm, but to his relief, Eddie doesn’t ask him what’s wrong. Instead all he says is “I love you.” 

With one hand he strokes down Richie’s wrist, over his knuckles and down the back of his fingers, one hand after the other, over and over until he can feel the tension drip out of them. Richie stops gripping the mattress so tightly and lets Eddie gently prize the fingers from their hold and softly play with them. Meanwhile Eddie uses his other hand to play with Richie’s chest, lightly tracing over it with his fingernails, drawing the tightness out of it. After a few minutes it is only the lump in his throat that remains, but even that is being shrunk down as Eddie places chaste kisses up and down his neck.

It wasn’t sexual, not at first at least, but Richie’s nipples respond anyway to Eddie’s ministrations. “So sensitive baby…” Eddie smirks into his shoulder, and Richie has to bite his lip to hold back his response. “Can I show you how much I love you?” Eddie asks quietly. Richie doesn’t say anything, he can’t right now, but he knows his boyfriend can feel his nod. The hands on his chest grow more purposeful, teasing and pinching the nipples deliberately and Richie lets out as a gasp. The mouth on his neck starts leaving longer and deeper kisses, and at the first hint of teeth Richie makes a whimpering sound and one of his legs jerks. 

“Shhh baby, just let me take care of you” Eddie soothes, removing the hand he had intertwined with Richie’s and placing it on his knee, holding his leg steady. The brunette’s mouth returns to the task at hand, biting and sucking at Richie’s long neck, forcing out all sorts of choked off noises, before eventually pulling off with a pop, humming in satisfaction at his work, and licking the blooming mark he created. All the while, his hand is inching higher and higher up Richie’s inner thigh, a teasing pace that has Richie wiggling his hips impatiently. He’s achingly hard, uncomfortable inside his boxers, but not able to do anything but wait desperately for his lover. Even when Eddie gets there, he runs his fingers in the most featherlight touch over his hardness, tracing the shape of him through the thin material, and he makes a satisfied sound when he feels the wet spot in the middle of them. 

“Can I touch you?” Eddie asks and Richie makes an inarticulate sound of enthusiasm in answer. There’s no delay now as Eddie plunges his hand into the boxers and grips him firmly, Richie whines and bucks his hips forwards.

“You’re so wet” Eddie chuckles, dragging his hand up Richie’s length and swiping over the head, gathering the pre, before pulling his hand out and bringing it up to Richie’s mouth. “See?” he asks, and Richie doesn’t hesitate before opening his mouth and sucking on the fingers, laving his tongue around them and tasting himself.

“So eager aren’t you Chee?” Richie nods and hums.

“Such a good boy for me.”

Eddie pulls his fingers out with a pop and helps Richie tug his boxers down and kick them off, making him sigh at the relief. Eddie returns to stroking Richie’s cock, and listens to his whimpers, before leaning over and whispering in his ear “Can I be inside you baby?”

Richie moans and fervently nods his consent.

Eddie leans over for him for a moment, stretching across to read the bedside table and grab the lube, and Richie wants to roll around in the feel of Eddie’s body covering his own. But it only lasts a second before his boyfriend is back behind him, warming the lube and pressing his fingers into him. He opens Richie up quickly, till his hole is quivering and messy with lube. Richie wants to push back, but Eddie gently holds him down with a hand on his hip, so all he can do is squirm and whine while Eddie tells him how good he is.

Then Eddie strips off his silk pyjamas and slicks up his cock, and he’s pressing himself into Richie, and the dark-haired man’s mouth falls open and he can’t breathe, all he can do is lie there and feel himself getting fuller and fuller with the man he loves. Eddie pushes with a glacial, aching slowness that has Richie relishing in every inch and desperately wanting Eddie to take him quicker. Only when he can feel Eddie’s hips press against his ass does he managed to take a choked breath and let out a stuttered moan.

“God, Richie you feel so fucking good. You’re so good to me” Eddie groans, and wraps his arms and legs around him, spooning him close.

With equal slowness, he withdraws his cock and presses it back it, slowly and purposefully, forcing the whimpers up and out of Richie’s chest with each and every gentle thrust. Richie can feel every inch of Eddie inside of him, the way his wide head holds his rim open, before massaging his walls as he pushes his way back in, and finally pressing against his prostrate with deliberate exactness, firm and soft all at once. 

A couple of times Richie manages to whisper the word “Eds”, but other than that all he can do his gasp and whine as his boyfriend works him over.

Eddie is much more vocal though. He tells him how tight he is as he kisses up and down the back of his neck. 

When he takes two fingers and teases them over Richie’s lips before plunging them in and watching Richie suck on them he says just how beautiful he is. 

After a little while he pulls his digits out, Richie tries to chase after them with his mouth, but Eddie is already grabbing Richie’s wrist and pulling his hand down between his legs. He guides Richie’s fingers so they trace around his rim, stroking gently as Eddie’s cock plunges inbetween them, and he asks if Richie can “feel that? Can you feel how good you are baby?”

As he takes his other hand and swipes delicately over the head of Richie’s cock Eddie tells him that he loves him.

But then he stops all motion all together, just lies there, buried to the hilt for a few moments of complete fullness. Just when Richie is beginning to recover his senses Eddie says one more thing. 

“I’m going to show you how much I love you.”

He pulls his cock almost all the way out and then slams back in and Richie keens. Eddie quickly repeats the motion over and over again, driving his cock at an unrelenting pace. Richie is rendered incoherent, an endless litany of garbled sounds spills out of his lips as Eddie jackhammers into him, driving him insane. Over the sound of his cries and the slap of hips against his ass, he can just about here Eddie’s grunts and whispers of his name behind him. His vision blurs and he can feel his pre leak onto the bedsheets and he wants to writhe and push back against Eddie, but he’s being held too tight, so he lies there and lets Eddie plunge his brain into overdrive.

It might have lasted a few minutes or a few hours, Richie doesn’t know, his thoughts are too fuzzed up with everything that Eddie is doing to him. He’s close, he knows that’s, but he doesn’t realise how close till Eddie is wrapping a hand around his cock and stroking him with an urgent, off-rhythmic grip and it isn’t long before the feeling that has been cresting inside of him tumbles over the edge and explodes. He can hear the long, drawn-out moan that he makes and can feel his come shooting out of his cock and all over Eddie’s hand and his own chest, but the rest of his awareness is whited-out by blinding ecstasy, so intense that his body wants to leap across the room, but he’s still being held down too tightly, so he just spasms and jerks in Eddie’s arms. 

After was seems like an age, he comes down just enough to be able to process Eddie crying the word “Chee” and slamming his hips a final time and coming deep inside of him, flooding him with his come and filling him up, grinding into his prostate until Richie is whimpering from the overstimulation. 

And just like that it’s over. They both lie there, still wrapped around one another, and Eddie slowly softening inside of him. Gradually their gasping breaths grow softer and stiller, and Richie can feel Eddie’s chest growing and shrinking in sync with his own. They’re both covered in sweat and come, but Eddie doesn’t say anything about it, just whispers sweet things into his ear.

Richie is feeling so much right now, all these emotions broiling in his belly that threaten to burst out of them. As Eddie tells him how much he loves him, Richie focuses on shutting those feelings down one by one, pushing them back into the boxes that Eddie unlocked.

He doesn’t manage to say anything back to Eddie, but he does manage to ensure that not a single tear spills from his eyes. 

***

“Fuck.”

Richie hopped off his chair, turned around and marched angrily to the other side of the room to stare balefully at the wall.

“Fucking shit.”

He turns back around to glare at the laptop.

“I’m such a fucking moron.” 

He strides back to his desk to pointlessly re-read the message for the fourteenth time, a message that he’s already memorised and seared onto the inside of his eyelids. Not that that stops him from picking the text of the screen and slapping himself around the face with it. 

The message is about testing feedback that Bev has sent him regarding an escort mission that he designed. A lot of it is the usual sort of comments, a few minor fixes and adjustments that he’s already compiled a list of. But one of the genius aspects of Bev’s testing is the sheer variety of playtesters that she brings in – not just the usual white gamer bros in their early twenties, but a diverse selection of different people from different backgrounds and with varying levels of experience with video games. It helps _Clubhouse Collective_ a fuckton with being able to appeal to a diverse crowd and in making their games accessible to wide breadth of gamers, from the casual to the hardcore.

The problem now is the feedback from a Sarah T. a woman the same age as Maggie, a semi-retired white woman who’s looking for some new hobbies and has decided to try some of the games that her adult children are always talking about. According to her notes Sarah’s never particularly seen the appeal in a lot of games, but is interested in those with a good story and characters, and she’s liked the parts of the game she’s played so far. Apart from Richie’s escort mission, because she just doesn’t get it, she doesn’t know what to do.

Richie swears and stands and stares. He can feel the anger building up inside him, a burning in his belly that is pouring steam through his body. Why the hell can’t he figure this out? This is what he’s supposed to be good at, part of the reason Bill brought him in in the first place, because he knows how to make gameplay mechanics intuitive and easy to pick up. Yet right now he can’t imagine a way of fixing the level, his brain offers no suggestions no matter how hard he whips it. They gave him all that time off from work because they trusted he could deliver when he came back, and now he just fucking can’t, because he’s too much of a worthless designer to even be capable of fixing a problem that he created in the first place. The steam has filled every nook and cranny inside of him, desperate for a way to escape, but he’s sealed it in and he can feel it bulging under his skin.

But as furious as he is with himself, he’s even more livid with Sarah. As he watched the footage of her failing over and over again he asks _why can’t you just figure it out? I gave you all the clues, all the explanations, the interactive demonstration so why the hell can’t you just carry on and do it? Why are you blaming me when this is clearly your fault you dumb fucking idiot?_. The pressure doesn’t stop building, he can feel the rivets straining and his body buckling and threatening to burst. 

_Everyone else can work this out Sarah so why can’t you? It’s an escort mission, you have to protect and guide your kid. How can you just refuse to do that? Why are you starting and then just giving up halfway through? What the fuck is wrong with you Sarah? Goddamit, why can’t you just do it properly and do what you’re supposed to do Maggie?_.

Before he explodes, he lashes out and punches the screen, hard, and watches the footage of Sarah failing disappear into a pleasing mess of pixels and fractures. He breathes heavily, flushed with feeling and stares at the broken laptop with savage glee.

“Richie?”

The voice makes him turn his head, and he sees Eddie and the other Losers standing in the doorway of his office with horrified expressions.

The steam rushes out of him in an instant, and he stands there, fractured and buckling and doesn’t know what to say. His hand hurts.

“We just wanted to see if you wanted to get lunch, but, um…” Bev trails off.

Richie makes an inarticulate sound in the back of his throat and gestures vaguely at his laptop as if it will offer some convenient and understandable explanation. It declines to do so.

“You guys go ahead, we’ll catch up” Eddie says, and he ushers the others out of the room and closes the door behind them. “Jesus, Richie, are you okay?” he asks, glancing at Richie’s hand and walking over to the other desk. Richie shrugs and watches him.

Eddie opens a drawer and pulls out a small black medical kit, opens it up and begins unpacking its supplies.

“Wait, how long has that been in there?” Richie asks.

“Since you moved into this office. I know how accident prone you are you clumsy oaf” Eddie says affectionally, pouring antiseptic onto some cotton wool. Richie smirks and chuckles, and lets his boyfriend begin to treat his hand. Eddie holds his wrist while he works, slowly running his thumb back and forth along the joint as he mops up the blood and the guilt.

The silence lasts for a while, semi-comfortably, before Eddie finally breaks it. “But I’m guessing this wasn’t an accident was it?”

Richie swallows. “Well, you know how it is Eds. You’re working away, and then you get an email and you click on it and this scary face pops up so you freak out and punch the screen. All perfectly normal.”

“That’s like the oldest prank in internet history. What, are you going to tell me you did this because you got Ric Rolled next?”

“Please Spaghetti, you know I’d never do that to you. I am never going to give you up…”

“Shut the fuck up” Eddie snorts and rolls his eyes.

When he’s done attending to Richie’s hand, Eddie packs the kit away and slips it back into the drawer, before turning back to Richie and dragging into him into a fierce kiss. Richie returns it with muffled surprise, but as suddenly as the kiss started it ends, and Eddie pulls back with a serious expression fixed on his face.

“So. We need to talk about it” Eddie says.

“It was just some dumb message, that annoyed me. And I lost my temper and I shouldn’t have, and I’ll pay for the laptop…” Richie replies, avoiding eye contact.

“Not about the laptop” Eddie interrupts firmly. “We need to talk about your mom.”

Richie falls back into frightened silence, but Eddie doesn’t stop looking at him. Eventually, Richie shrugs. “There’s not really much to say. You know what happened, you were at the hospital and the funeral.”

“Well she’s dead for a start.”

“Exactly. What else is there to say about it?”

“Well, clearly there must be something you want to say about it” Eddie replies, gesturing to the broken laptop.

“Yeah but…look…it doesn’t matter” Richie stammers out.

“It doesn’t matter?” Eddie says incredulously. “You loved Maggie, so goddamn much. I know her death just ‘doesn’t matter’ to you.”

“Yeah, but it’s not, like…important” Richie says quietly and trailingly.

“Of course it’s important. Not only was she your mother, not only was she important, everytime I even try and broach the subject you shut it down and barricade me off from it. You take on all the work, you barely hold back the tears and you just annihilated an LCD screen and refuse to say why. Clearly you are having a lot of feelings here and clearly they’re important.”

Richie tries to say something, but he can’t. A very different sort of feeling is bubbling inside of him, but it’s building just as quickly as the rage did earlier.

Eddie gives him a moment, but then carries on. “Is it because you don’t want to talk to me about it? Like I understand that I don’t exactly have a comparable relationship with my mother, but we can find someone else for you to talk to if you prefer, like a professional, or-“

Richie shakes his head. “It’s not that.”

“Then what it is it?”

Richie opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it. “It’s…not your problem.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? You’re my boyfriend. I love you and I can see you’re hurting and I want to fix that, of course it’s my problem.”

“Yeah, but…”

“But what Richie? I know that you know that I love you, and that you love me, so why don’t you want to let me help? Are you saying that you wouldn’t do the same for me if it was the other way around?”

“God, no Eds, of course I would!”

“Then what it is it?”

“It…” Richie can’t breathe. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it fucking matters!”

“I…”

“Please.”

“I DON’T MATTER! Okay?!” 

The words explode out of Richie without his consent, and they leave only silence and emptiness in their wake. The quiet is only broken by the sound of both of their laboured breathing. Richie looks at the floor, but he can feel Eddie’s eyes on him.

He hears the sound of slow footsteps, and then he feels Eddie’s arms ensnare him. A hand on his chin gently guides his head up and Eddie’s lips slot onto his own. The kiss is slow and meaningful, and it soothes Richie’s breathing.

When it breaks off, his boyfriend asks him quietly “Chee, do you really think that?”

Richie squirms awkwardly. “Yeah…sort of. Not really. Just…”

“I know you have problems accepting that about yourself, but you know you matter a metric fuckton to me right? And to the Losers? And…you mattered a lot to your mom as well. You do know that?”

“Yeah I know. It’s just…” Richie’s gaze drops to the floor again, but Eddie’s hand catches his chin once more and guides him back up to eye level. 

“Just what?” Eddie prompts.

“I just don’t want you to have to deal with all of this when it’s all my problem. It’s not your job to clear up all my messes.”

“Richie you know that’s kind of part and parcel of being boyfriends with someone. When I said I loved you I-“

“I know that’s what you said and I know that you meant it!” Richie interrupts. “That doesn’t mean you really want to actually mop up my problems when it comes to it. Not when you’re actually faced with the fact that your boyfriend isn’t just a guy you like hanging out with and fucking, but also throws a tantrum whenever he sees an email that reminds him too much of his dead mommy. You didn’t sign up for that.”

“Yeah I did” Eddie says firmly. 

“What?”

“I did. Unlike you I do actually read the terms and conditions before clicking subscribe. I didn’t know this particular problem was going to happen, but I knew something would happen at some point, and I agreed to help deal with it when the time came.”

“Yeah but-“

“Nope. No buts. I know what you’re going to say Richie and it is true – when I first met you I thought you were this cool, enigmatic guy with a deep and private love life that you wouldn’t share with me no matter how much I wanted you to. And you know what happened when I actually found you were a dork with terrible taste in wine and whose best friend was an imaginary cat?”

“What?”

“I fell for you harder. So don’t tell me that I didn’t know what I was signing up for.”

Richie doesn’t know what to say back to that, but his heart beats heavily and a smile creeps onto his face.

“Now I’m not saying I’m the best at it or anything,” Eddie continues, “but I think I am quite good at helping you. Before Maggie got sick again, you were happier than you used to be. Right?” A slight note of nervousness can be heard in Eddie’s voice.

Richie nods fervently and put his hands on Eddie’s shoulders. “God yes, you made me so much better Eds, you-“

“And you you’re good for me as well right?” Eddie interrupts. “Like I know it sounds unbelievable, but the others will confirm it, I used to have so many more sticks up my butt before I met you.”

Richie can’t help but take the bait. “Which is weird because I keep putting my stick up your butt” he smirks.

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Yeah yeah, but I think you dislodged all the sticks with your plumber dick.”

Richie giggles.

They kiss again. And again.

When they surface Eddie asks him, “So do you want to talk about Maggie?”

Richie takes a deep breath. “I just…I just miss her so much” he says, his voice cracking. “It hurts, and all I want is for her to be back. I want her to be back for me, and I want her to be back for herself. But then sometimes I think of how she was at the end, and even the few years before then, and I’m glad she’s gone, but I’m also still kind of mad at her for going. And then sometimes I’ll suddenly realise that I haven’t thought about her all day and I’m mad at myself like I’m forgetting about her, like she doesn’t matter to me anymore, and…” he trails off, the lump in his throat threatening to burst.

Eddie nods. “Sounds like you’re feeling a lot Chee. And we’re going to work through all of those feelings I promise you. We’re going to make them your bitch. But to do that, you need to let yourself actually _feel_ them. Not just hide them away from everyone.”

“How did my spaghetti turn out to be so wise?” Richie smiles. “The wisest of all the pastas.”

“Please, I’ve always been the wisest.”

“I mean wiser than penne sure. But that fusilli sure is smart…”

“Fuck off. Fusilli can bite my ass that esoteric little bitch.”

Richie giggles and Eddie smiles at him proudly.

“We can get someone professional for you to talk to” the shorter man continues. “In fact, we both could probably use that, but I also want you to understand that I want to talk about all of it with you. I mean it. You’re my co-op partner. And the other Losers will help too.”

“Yeah but I don’t want to bother them-“

“You won’t. They want to help. In fact,” Eddie raises his voice, “they’re probably listening at the door right now.”

_”No we’re not”_ Ben’s voice calls back faintly from behind the wood.

Both of them laugh at that, but Eddie waits for Richie’s nod before calling out for the others to join them. They all spill into the room and Richie’s jaw muscles feel like they’re going to break so broad is his grin.

Stan fixes Richie with a firm stare and the softest expression Richie has ever seen him wear outside of Patty’s presence. “Eddie is right” he says. “Firstly, I can confirm that Eddie used to have many more sticks up his butt.” He dodges the elbow from Eddie and continues. “Secondly, we are going to be there for you. The exact same way we were there for Bill when Audra broke up with him and he went through this super intense emo phase.”

“The same way we all helped Stan cut ties with his asshole of a father” Bill responds.

“Or when we had to make sure that Tom would finally leave Bev alone” Ben chimes in, and Bev kisses him on the cheek before saying “We did it when Ben was having eating problems.”

“And when Bill thought that Mike didn’t like him so he kept going to all these poetry seminars so he could write him a 500-stanza epic about how beautiful he was” Eddie adds.

“You were all there for me when I had the racist roommate in college” Mike says.

“Not to mention that time when Bill had the incident with the starfish and the-“ 

“Hey you did me already!” Bill interrupts.

“The point is” Eddie says, hugging Richie tight. “We’re going to get you through this. I promise.”

Richie’s eyes blink shut, but he can feel Bev’s arms join Eddie’s in wrapping around him, followed by Ben’s and Mike’s and Bill’s and Stan’s and his heart feels like it’s going to explode out of his chest.

“We meant it you know” Bill says. “Welcome to the Losers Club.”

“You asshole” Eddie adds in a whisper, and Richie laughs and then, for the first time since Maggie stopped breathing, standing in his office and surrounded by the arms of his family, Richie cries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was the last 'full' chapter, with the final one being more a short epilogue (at least that's what I'm planning, in reality it'll probably end up being another 10k).
> 
> Thank you for everyone who has read, kudosed and commented.


	13. Launch day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shortish and purely fluff, I promise you.

**Eighteen months later**

Launch day for the game they have up simply calling _The Terror_ is finally here, and the _Clubhouse Collective_ is naturally in a state of both elation and fear at the same time. It’s been a long development road for them all, and it seems almost unbelievable that the end point has finally come. There’s been the usual litany of delays and problems and disagreements, but all things considered, the long and winding river has been remarkably free of rapids for a major project like this.

The only time the Losers had had any real argument over the game was when they had the major crunch meeting over cutting some of the playable characters. The playtester feedback was clearly showing that the testers were feeling a little overwhelmed with the number of different kids they could pick from, and feared some of their personal plotlines would therefore be underdeveloped. Tempers flared as they argued over how many would be a good number, which kids should be retained for possible future DLC, and everyone was doubling down to try and save their personal favourites from being cut.

It was until the sixth hour when Ed and Larry wandered into the room to re-fill their supply of stress-eating-danishes, that their pair of interns halted the argument with a deep, simultaneous sigh. “Why not just have the 7 ‘you’ kids as the playable characters?” Larry asked them.

The Losers all turned to stare at the young man.

“What ‘us’ kids?” Mike asked.

“The 7 kids that are clearly versions of yourselves” Ed says plainly.

“Duh” Larry adds helpfully.

They let out another simultaneous sigh in response to the Losers’ blank looks before Ed starts pointing at them around the table one by one, while Larry jabs his finger at the corresponding concept art on the walls – “The loud-mouth terrified of his own sexuality. The tiny hypochondriac. The girl hated by all the other women in town. Shy, chubby new kid. Homeschool boy. And overprotective big brother with a speech impediment. Duh.”

And with that the interns waltzed out, leaving the rest of them staring at one another in a collective ‘huh’ moment.

So they had indeed ended up with these seven options, unknowingly modelled on themselves. Mix in a few of the parental plotlines they’d assigned to other characters and some embarrassing childhood photos for the art team (the reflection’s on Richie’s glasses proved a nightmare to light correctly) and now they proudly have seven different copies of the game laid out for display in the middle of the office, a different cover for each character, all of them quailing beneath the daemonic clown figure, the form that the unnamed malevolent entity most favoured. It hadn’t formed part of any of the press releases that the characters were mini-mes of the developers (or mini-mini-me in Eddie’s case) – that seemed like it might sound a little egotistical – but they’d spoken freely about it being a very personal game for the _Collective_ , and the collectible covers had trended nicely on social media.

Launch day itself seems, if not exactly an anti-climax, then certainly like a day overloaded with all of the energy but there being nothing to do with it. After all, they’re here, surrounded by marketing materials and artwork for the game they’ve strived on for two years, plus large quantities of celebratory champagne and nibbles, but all the jobs have already been completed. The reviews are out, and incredibly favourable. The ads have all been released. Early copies of the game have been played by select YouTubers and the interest in it is skyrocketing. Pre-orders are up, and the game is on shelves. They’ve managed to avoid the curse of a day one patch. In a few days they’ll start the post-mortem analysis of reviews and sales figures, but for now there’s not much to do.

Stan is staring at his phone, reading off sales updates every few minutes while Patty tries to get him to eat something.

Bill looks nervous and keeps asking if the others are having any of the same second-guesses he is about choices they made. Mike shuts every single one of them up with a kiss.

Bev and Ben seem entirely unbothered, sat in a corner together and getting happily day drunk.

Eddie is pacing back and forth, checking their social media feeds on different laptops and bothering the interns about the mentions they’re getting.

Richie is stood in the corner, watching it all play out with a smile. Every time his eye falls on Eddie his heart lurches and his hand closes around the small box in his pocket.

He can’t stop watching the smaller man, but he can’t really blame himself. As proud as he is of everything he’s done at work over the past year and a half, he’s even prouder of everything he and Eddie have accomplished together. They’ve bought a house together, and have fused their decorative styles together successfully, Eddie’s rich and muted taste combining quite nicely with Richie’s riots of colour – even Ben and Bev have declared it to be very tasteful, and they looked sincere when they said it (though Ben was a bit put out they now have a major rival when it comes to hosting games nights). They’ve fused their collection of memorabilia together and distributed it through the house.

Dobbin loves the extra space and the garden, but fearing that he might be lonely with their long hours at the office and surprisingly busy social life, Richie and Eddie have gotten him a companion. To everyone’s delight, Dob and Red XIII get on like a house on fire and half of the group chat is dedicated to feline updates of them playing and snuggling together.

After a couple of tries they’ve also found a therapist that works for Richie, and together they’ve made remarkable progress in tackling all of Richie’s various issues, from the loss of Maggie, to his childhood, and his anxiety and self-esteem. And as much as the help has helped, he thinks the other Losers have helped even more. Stan was incredible with the paperwork, and all of them were the most solid of rocks when it came to getting him through his grief over his mom. He still found it hard at time, and the hurt kept coming back at the strangest of times like a knife in the dark. They were always there to help pull it out though.

None of that holds even the wispiest of candles to how much Eddie has helped him though. The man deserves to be festooned with medals.

Richie doesn’t even get suspicious about feeling happy anymore. He just takes it and rolls in it.

Eddie himself took a little longer to start tackling his own issues, much too stubborn and too focused on helping Richie to do so earlier. They both thought it might happen when they moved in together, when Eddie lost his residential independence, had to allow someone else to make decorative and logistical choices with him and had to deal with an intense disagreement over whether or not a wine fridge was too bougie (the answer was that it is, but Eddie would allow it provided Richie accepted that inflatable chairs were no longer cool).

But Eddie ended up surprising them both by saying that he “found it easy. The Sonia-shaped me inside my head told me that this would be horrible and in the end…it really wasn’t that big a deal. We just kind of…did it. And I didn’t immediately become your slave.”

It had actually taken another three months before that ‘just not make a big deal out of it’ approach hit its limits, when Eddie had ended up snapping at Richie so many times as he was making dinner that Richie almost cried. Of course as soon as Eddie saw his face he couldn’t stop apologising for upsetting him, and Richie apologised to him for not doing it correctly in the first place, and after several hours of tears they both agreed that Eddie ought to start seeing a therapist about his problems with independence as well.

Two months after that Eddie had taken Richie to the nursing home to meet his mother, and when she predictably blew up he absolutely _slew_ his maternal dragon in a twenty-minute long, semi-rehearsed, semi-improvised speech about every shitty thing she did and how he was finally going to be free from it, and that no he wasn’t visiting her on Thanksgiving but he would send her a jar of cranberry sauce. Then he dragged his ecstatic boyfriend back home with him, where he promptly gave him the dicking of his life, and then accepted Richie’s waterfall of praise with shy pride.

The one obstacle that Eddie still seemed to struggle with occasionally was wrapping his head around the fact that Richie really had fallen in love with him for all the right reasons. Sometimes he still worried that it was only because Eddie was the first guy to ever be openly interested in Richie and poor Richie had just mistaken his elation over this for genuine love. It kept cropping up occasionally, a whack-a-mole that Richie had to keep slapping down. He’d made a lot of progress the day he said “Look Eddie, you know I love the other Losers right? And objectively speaking, they would all be amazing to be in a relationship with, yes?”

“I mean,” he continued. “Is Bill incredibly attentive? Yes. Is Ben the sweetest little muffin the world has ever seen, and is Bev also the coolest brownie in human history? Also yes. Stan is surprisingly romantic, and I can only imagine that Mike is a devil in the sack.”

“He is” Eddie nods. “I was in the room next to him and Bill in sophomore year. I had to buy earplugs.”

“Exactly! But do I want to be dating any of them? Not in the least. I love them all, but you? You're _Eddie_. That’s who I love. More than anyone.”

And it was true. He still felt guilty about it from time to time, but he knew that he loved Eddie more than he had ever loved anyone else. More than Maggie, more than Went, more than Dobbin. Even more than Link, the Hero of Hyrule. 

He was feisty and smart and beautiful and witty and caring and funny and he was everything. He was Eddie Kaspbrak and Richie could never get enough.

So as he stood there, clutching the little box in his pocket he felt nervous but excited. He’d planned the proposal out with all the other Losers, and they’d rehearsed their parts exactly. As soon as Richie gave the signal they’d all stage the big, silly proposal that Richie knew Eddie would pretend to be embarrassed about, before saying yes and whispering into Richie’s ear that he loved it.

It was a little scary sure. But it wasn’t the same sort of fear, that all-encompassing terror or self-doubt that he had felt, all that time ago, the night before he was due to start work at the _Collective_.

This time he knew without a doubt, that doing this would make him and Eddie happier than they had ever been before. And that’s all that mattered.

Because right now, he felt like there wasn’t anything else to it. 

***

Eddie Kaspbrak had always known that he’d been a scared, fairly neurotic man, terrified of losing his independence. For a long time he had blamed his mother. After almost severing ties with the Losers after college he’d started blaming himself as well. After a while he’d stopped trying to find someone to blame and started just accepted his fears as a fact of life and managed them as best he could.

Then this odd, galumphing mess of a man by the name of Richie Tozier had plopped into his life and everything had begun to change. He’d resisted his attraction to, and later feelings for, the other man for quite a while, too wary of what would happen if he actually tried to have a relationship with him. Even after he’d decided that the disadvantages of such a relationship could be outweighed by the many bonuses that came from fucking, dating and falling in love with Richie, he’d never quite been able to shake that tingling at the back of his skull that told him that tying himself down to another person would sacrifice everything he fought to liberate from his mother’s clutches.

So perhaps it was no surprise that it escaped his notice at the time, but it was Maggie’s illness that finally strapped most of those fears to a concrete block and dropped them down a well. Sonia had used the excuse of (mostly-imaginary) tragedy and heartache to try and drag Eddie back into her jaws throughout much of his teenage years and so being presented with a boyfriend whose burgeoning happiness had suddenly collapsed into melancholy should have sent Eddie running for the hills, desperate to not fall for the same trick again. The idea of actually tying his feelings to someone else’s grief, obligating his own sadness for the sake of matching someone else’s…that should have felt too chillingly maternal, too much like Sonia was forcing his tears to be in sync with her own once more.

But it didn’t. It didn’t feel like that all.

Somehow the idea of self-preservation from emotional manipulation and keeping his happiness independent from others didn’t even cross Eddie’s mind once. The sight of Richie’s face, pale and shocked, hollow eyes trying to hold back tears, banished the thoughts completely from his brain. All he wanted to do was wipe that face away. 

Of course it wasn’t as if his all of his issues and hang-up had simply been flushed down a whirlpool in an instant. He still had to keep an eye on them, hack the vines back from time to time and occasionally they even spilled over out of his control. Therapy helped, no matter how long he had obstinately put it off for. But it was Richie who helped more than anything else.

Because when he thought about it had been that point, the moment he saw Richie’s face and every screaming instinct of self-preservation fell silent for the first time in years. That was the moment that he was _done_. There was never going to be another option for him after that.

Today was launch day, and Eddie was pacing back and forth in the office, keeping an eye on his boyfriend, and trying to build up the nerve to do what he’d known now for over several months that he was going to half to do. He wanted to do it, more than anything. But goddamn, was it intimidating. He tried to disguise these nerves by checking in with all their social media accounts, a thoroughly pointless task because he knew perfectly well that the interns knew perfectly well what they were doing. He also used the chance to keep surreptitiously asking the Losers if they were all ready and that they knew they’re parts, as if Eddie hadn’t spent days writing the script, getting Bill and Mike to polish it and then forcing all the Losers to memorise it word-perfect. When he whispered to Bev to ask if she still had the ring, she simply rolled her eyes rather than reply that she had not, in fact, managed to lose it in the forty-six seconds since he last asked her.

He took a deep breath. He could do this. It was for Richie. And himself.

It almost felt like a reward, for getting through the past two years and everything that had happened in it. The game, the messiness of their early relationship, doing battle with their own issues….and Maggie. That still felt like the hardest thing that Eddie has ever done, even more so than shouting at his mother or patching things up with the Losers. Watching his boyfriend suffer while not having the faintest clue how to persuade him to share the burden was hell. Richie had done such an enthusiastic but unconvincing job of pretending that he was handling everything just fine, like he was hiding behind a beautiful and elaborate, but far too-small, mask. Like he was standing in court, drenched in blood and holding the victim’s severed head, but still somehow making the jury laugh.

Eddie was so glad that Richie had finally let him and the others have a way in.

Of course it hadn’t all been plain sailing since then, with more than one sea monster to navigate past. For every two days forward they’d stepped forward, they’d been one where they’d fallen back, where Richie would break down over the smallest provocation and Eddie had struggled to console him. Still, they’d made progress nevertheless, slowly and painfully. It had never exactly gotten _better_. But it had gotten less worse. Every tear shed felt a little bit like another ounce of pain extracted. Richie had talked a lot, about Maggie and his childhood and everything else. It had helped Eddie talk as well. Richie had ended up delighting in the opportunity to remember her, leaping on the chance to tell Eddie something about her whenever something triggered a memory. Their home was decorated with several bits of memorabilia and they’d each picked a favourite photo of her to place somewhere in the house.

Went seemed to be doing well enough as well. He’d moved, and spent a lot of time travelling, sending them badly-framed selfies from around the world. He’d taken on a whole bunch of hobbies, and both Eddie and Richie were resigned to the fact that every single birthday and Christmas present from him would now be something that he’d bravely, but haphazardly, home-made.

The one niggling issue that still bothered Eddie was that he couldn’t find the word to describe how Richie had changed since he’d known him. It was dumb to dwell on a matter of nomenclature, but still it irritated the dickens out of him. At one point he’d even had a full-blown, self-induced crisis by asking himself if Richie was still the same person he’d fallen in love with. After all, when he first met him, Richie had been shy, terrified, skinny Bambi of a man, deeply insecure and deathly quiet most of the time. Now he was confident, thoroughly gregarious, confident in himself and thoroughly incapable of shutting up.

The crisis had been brief though, because it was clear that Richie Tozier was still the same person after all and hadn’t been replaced by some chattier doppelganger. All of those qualities had been inside of him from the very beginning, they’d just been buried. Had Richie opened up, was that it? Was it just that Richie had, _ugh_ , blossomed?

No, that wasn’t it either. Because there were some genuine changes in him, new things that he’d picked up. He had improved his skills as a game developer, a friend and a lover. There was a new-found talent for stand-up and a burgeoning interest in DM’ing long, elaborate and slightly nonsensical D+D campaigns to add into the mix.

It was more like Richie had evolved, no _morphed_ , into the person he always was. He’d make a cool looking Animorph cover.

It wasn’t that Eddie had _fixed_ him, though the thought had once occurred to him. Firstly, that whole concept was pretty toxic, secondly, Richie had fixed himself just as much as Eddie had helped him under the hood. Plus, there was the fact that Richie had never been _broken_ in the first place, not as such. He was always working, just not correctly. It wasn’t as if someone had to open up his code and debug it, more that they just had to hit F5 and refresh the page.

Whatever. The phraseology didn’t matter. It was time.

Richie was looking at him with a determined expression and looked as if he was about to do something. Eddie had just spent the past thirty minutes psyching himself up and needed to do it now before he lost his nerve. 

He nodded the signal to the other Losers and took a deep breath. He loved Richie, more than anything else. He wanted to spend the rest of his life doing everything he could to make Richie happy, and let Richie do everything in his power to continue making him happier than he had been before as well.

Eddie was going to propose the hell out of his boyfriend. He was going to marry the Richie who had reloaded. 

***

The boy runs, quickly as he can, dashing across the darkened road before skidding to an ungainly stop and ducking into a crouch behind a bush. He looks terrified, skin pale and sheening, eyes wide and his rapid breaths can be heard even above the thunder of the rain. He glances down at his arm, where a thin jagged cut mars the flesh, trickling blood onto the sodden ground. With a trembling hand he smoothly unzips his fanny pack and pulls out a packet of band aids, but as he goes to apply it the cut suddenly changes into a great, festering wound, half the skin of his forearm has been torn away leaving behind only raw bloody flesh.

Yet just as suddenly as the wound grew, it shrinks again to a small, grubby cut. The band-aid is applied, and the child seems to breathe a little easier.

Cautiously, he rises to a standing position and looks around for some sign of his pursuer. He seems to be alone, but it’s hard to spot anything through the lashing rain, which seems to blanket his surroundings in an impenetrable banner. Taking his chances, he starts running from bush to bush, making his way down the road in alternate sprints and dives for cover. 

For a time that feels too long he is alone, but then just as he is running down a particularly exposed section of road the rain stops as quickly as if someone had turned off the tap. Even the droplets that were already falling seem to be wiped away and he is bathed in wan moonlight. He hesitates for just a moment, but then the light is blocked by a passing shadow, a shape half-seen out of the corner of his eye flashes onto the moon for a split second, he spins around trying to get a glimpse of it, but it is already gone and he stands alone once more.

The rain starts up again, heavier than before.

The boy ducks down again, and now picks his way forward slowly, and low to the ground, trying to make as little noise as possible. It’s hard to make out over over the rain, but he can hear something else out there as well. Sometimes it is a bestial howl, far off in the distance, at others it sounds more like a high-pitched voice and much closer. Rough growls seem to chase him from behind, and worse of all is the low sound of what he thinks is cackling _in front_ of him.

After several nerve-wracking minutes, the boy rounds a corner and sees a bridge, a simple and covered affair, dark with damp and wear. He’s crossed it several times before and it never seemed threatening then, but now it looms imposingly before him. The river beneath is normally little more than a trickle, but now the water gushes furiously. And there appears to be something lying down there, unaffected by the current…is that…faces? Staring palely upwards, unmoving and wating patiently.

It seems like madness, the bridge is much too exposed, but he doesn’t think he has a choice. The sounds are getting closer by the second and he has to make a move soon. Once more his hand ducks into his fanny pack and pulls out a firecracker. It feels like a feeble weapon, but it’s all he has left. 

He dashes to the bridge in a crouched run, hoping the wooden sides will mask his progress, but his feet slap loudly on the wooden boards. To his dawning horror, he realises that his run is followed by more creaking wood, but this is not from his steps, this is _above_ him.

He’s almost halfway across when suddenly there is a loud splinting sound just behind him. He whirls around and there it is, the head of a great beast crashing through the ceiling and lunging towards him. With a yell he throws the firecracker in wild instinct, but somehow his reflexes are true and the weapon strikes true, exploding right in the creature’s mouth, who rears back, yowling and stunned.

Flushed with panicked success, the boy turns back to sprint across the rest of the bridge, but too late he spots what he had missed – pale, fleshy arms reaching up from the river, squirming through the floorboards and grasping blindly. One seizes him by the ankle and he crashes down. He squirms wildly, flailing and trying to crawl away, to get up, to escape to do _anything_.

But it’s too later. The beast’s shadow looms over him, and with remarkable swiftness, a clawed paw lunges out and snatches his body up. It lifts him on high, taunting its prize for one long, agonising moment, before its jaws dart out and bite down and the boy dies with a choking scream.

“Oh fuck!” Dave exclaims, leaning reflexively back from the screen.

His sweaty hands drop the controller onto the sofa and he resists the urge to wrap his arms around himself. His heart is beating a rave in his chest, and he realises he’s been holding his breath and lets it out in a long exhale.

Jesus, that was terrifying. Just twenty minutes earlier he’d been trying to hold back the tears at a particularly poignant moment where two of the characters failed to express their feelings for one another. And twenty minutes before then he’d been laughing his ass off as he goofed off around town with the other kids. Hats off to the developers, whoever they are, they certainly made a masterpiece here.

But maybe he shouldn’t be playing it alone by himself in the dark.

He watches his character die and the words _YOU DIED_ appear in a simple, skinny red font on the screen. The perspective switches to first person so the player sees through the dead stare of their glassy-eyed character, because the game does like to rub it in when you failed, especially on higher difficulties.

What he can see now is the graffiti and carvings that festoon the wooden bridge. The Kissing Bridge they had called it in that cutscene earlier, and while it had looked beautifully in the excellent graphics then, Dave had expected that in the main game the bridge would be downgraded to something more low-res, but apparently not. The carvings aren’t even the cookie-cutter, repeat pattern that he would have expected. Instead it looks like a designer took the time to think of and draw each and every single individual carving, as if they all meant something personal to them.

The screen is already growing black as the game prepares to respawn his character at the last checkpoint, and Dave’s eyes struggle to examine as many of the designs as possible. There are three right in front of where he died.

The first is a cartoonish drawing of a cat dressed as a superhero, leaping into the sky, cape fluttering from its back.

The second one is a lot more detailed, a remarkably elaborate carving of a woman’s face, maybe in her late fifties and sporting a mischievous grin. It must have taken a very long time to design that, especially for a background asset that most players would never even notice. The words _Mags, The Queen_ are below.

The screen has faded almost entirely, so Dave isn’t entirely sure he makes the third image out properly, but it looks to be a simple scratching in the wood, though a deep one.

It consists of three characters. The first is an _R_.

Followed by a _+_ symbol.

Followed by an _E_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew. It's taken be the better part of a year to write this fic and at the end of it I haven't got the faintest clue how I feel.
> 
> Thank you so very, very much to everyone who has read any of it, even more so to those who have stuck it through to the end.  
> I'm sorry it took so long.
> 
> And thank you three-thousand to anyone who kudosed or commented. You people are awesome and songs shall be sung of you in Valhalla.

**Author's Note:**

> The laws of fanction dictate that when you write a fluffy oneshot, you are compelled to follow it up with an angsty multi-chapter. So here it is.
> 
> Be warned that as I have only vague ideas about where this is going, and am a very slow writer, updates won't be coming out quickly.


End file.
